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Ch223-Rock And Hard Place

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Sylver wasn’t sure what he expected, but he kind of liked how professional everyone appeared.

Dark colors, masks, gloves, and no one was wielding a giant war hammer. Oddly enough they looked almost identical to the cultivators in Faust’s sect, except their masks weren’t skull shaped, or white.

Is this Owl’s plan? To frame me? Sylver wondered as he materialized on one of the nearby roofs.

They were meeting in the run-down “ghost town” where Sylver had collected the decoy box that was later swapped for Anastasia’s. Sylver walked down a flight of invisible steps, and to his surprise, no one paid much attention to him.

Some of the people who had arrived earlier had moved various bits of rubble around to use as seats, while others did as Sylver did, and just remained standing while they waited for whatever it was they were waiting for.

More people arrived, all dressed in dark colors, with next to no skin showing. Sylver didn’t pay them much attention, because his [Lesser Perception] was glued on Wolf/Hound, who was standing there as if he wasn’t more powerful than everyone here put together.

He went out of his way to blend in, his gloves were new, his belt wasn’t wrapped properly, and his mask wasn’t even flush with his face, if Sylver hadn’t noticed his soul, he would have missed him. Hound had a sword with him, but it wasn’t his, the length was wrong for a man of his height, not to mention the grip was too wide for someone with his kind of hands.

Sylver would have assumed Hound was one of the 4 people standing near the middle. They were all wearing a necklace around their necks that made them look different each time Sylver stopped looking at them.

The woman with wide hips and square shoulders became a tall and lanky man, who then became a muscular giant that was bigger than Sylver, and was then replaced by a 5-foot-tall hunchback. Sylver stopped looking at them fairly quickly because he knew their rough shape from the way their shadows landed on the ground.

3 of them were men, about Faust’s height and build, and the third was a 7-foot-tall woman, that had a quiver at her left thigh, and a small crossbow slung over her shoulder. The letter had said to stay silent unless there was an emergency, and apparently, everyone took that to heart.

One of the leaders simply gestured and everyone started moving as the total number of people present reached 34. Hound stayed near the back, and Sylver walked slightly ahead of him.

Everyone kept their distance from one another, but it was just for show, nobody was on guard against the people around them. Even if they didn’t know each other by name or face, this wasn’t their first meeting. No one said a word as they ran.

The group’s silent leaders led them towards a seemingly abandoned mansion, 8 stories high, and made out of the same red wood everything else in this country was made out of. Everyone began to draw their weapons and prepared themselves, and Sylver followed suit, as he reached into the folds of his robe, and drew his ax.

Sylver had refrained from sending his shades too far away from him in case they tripped a Ki alarm of some sort, and instead simply waited for their silent leaders to give the signal.

Roughly half a minute passed after everyone had finished using their Ki to make their weapons harder, and their bodies stronger, or whatever it is they did.

The 8-story tall mansion sort of hopped upward, barely an inch, but enough for the various bits of dust on the walls to fall and envelop it in a cloud.

When the dust settled, Sylver saw that the ground near the left part of the mansion had sunk, as if a large animal had made a nest underneath the building.

There was a moment of confusion in the group Sylver was standing in, as a perplexed man wielding a sword with a green glowing edge appeared right next to the hole and stared at Sylver’s group. There was a shower of sparks, followed by the sound of a limp fleshy body landing on soft soil.

The cultivator who had fought the guard had a faint burn mark on his left shoulder, and right forearm, but otherwise appeared to be fine.

No one said a word as one of the leaders jumped down the hole.

Sylver followed the group, and one by one, people started climbing down the hole. He saw there was a slightly damaged ladder down there, and the walls were covered in soot. The cultivators didn’t bother using the ladder, and instead, just spread their legs out as they fell and pressed them against the walls to slow down their fall.

When it was Sylver’s turn, he jumped down into the dark hole, and just before he would have collided with the man who had gone before him, he used [Fog Form] to become a nearly invisible cloud of vapor. He very quickly traveled down the vertical passage, and materialized at the very bottom, to the surprise of the man holding a dimly glowing yellow-colored rock.

 As far as secret underground tunnels went, there wasn’t anything special about this one. It was dark, damp, and Sylver’s eyes felt uncomfortable from the increased air pressure.

The ceiling was quite low, so much so that Sylver would have needed to get onto his knees to stand up straight, but to make up for that, the walls were ridiculously far apart from each other.

There were two long pieces of metal embedded into the floor, going by the shape and the fact that there were grooves in the rock floor, some sort of wheeled device traveled along these small rails.

As the last person arrived, the 4 silent leaders gestured for everyone to walk forward.

The 4 leaders didn’t stop when the tunnel suddenly split into 3 and continued going forward. The rails on the ground turned right, and now Sylver and company were walking down a completely featureless tunnel.

A couple of people were holding small glowing rocks that provided just enough illumination that everyone wasn’t bumping into one another.

They walked for some time, as the 4 people leading them were following a very specific path through the maze of tunnels. Sylver and Ria both memorize the path they were taking, just in case.

Sylver guessed that this was a mining operation of some sort, the tunnels looked about right, but going by the grid pattern, they weren’t mining for ores and were instead searching for something.

Just like Sylver, and Faust, no one’s feet made any sound as they ran, Sylver couldn’t even hear the sound of people breathing.

Just as Sylver was about to ask, “how much longer,” the leaders stopped running. The woman leader, who currently appeared to be a dwarf-shaped man, placed her hand onto the wall and, going by the movement of her shoulders, pushed against it.

Sylver kept one eye on the girl but kept the rest of his eyes on Hound. Hound had taken a deep breath when the girl pushed against the wall, and as she pushed against the wall again, he continued to hold his breath.

Is he nervous?

With every attempt to push the wall away, Hound gripped the hilt of his sword harder and harder, he was ready to lunge at someone by the 6^th push.

Should I be nervous?

Sylver allowed the woman 10 more attempts at whatever she was doing, before he carefully walked through the crowd, and silently gestured towards the wall.

She gave the thing one final shove before she mockingly bowed and presented the empty wall to the masked giant.

Sylver placed his hand against the handprint she had created on the dusty surface and sent a pulse of mana through it.

“There’s something here. Feels like a pulley of some sort,” Sylver tapped out to Ria, even as she was already slithering around his shoulder, arm, and very carefully sent a razor-thin tendril out of Sylver’s sleeve.

“Oh wow… It's like a 50-pin lock and… Anyway, push against the wall on the count of three,” Ria said, as she counted down, and Sylver pushed with the rough amount of force he imagined the woman cultivator had been pushing with.

There was a barely audible click, followed by a deafening and echoing sound of something extremely large and hollow, slamming against something small and solid.

Sylver stepped away from the wall, as it started opening the way a garage door would. The dusty piece of façade effortlessly slid upward and out of the way, as Sylver’s companions did their best to shield their eyes from the sudden light.

A ridiculously wide staircase led downward, but before the wall had finished sliding out of the way, the 4 leaders were already running down the seemingly slippery with moisture carved stone stairs.

Sylver pretended to massage his hand while he waited for Hound to move and followed behind the significantly less nervous man.

He felt something weird brush against his face as they ran down the stairs, and after a couple of steps, realized he was passing through hundreds of Ki barriers. Every single step had at least 5 layers of dormant Ki barriers.

Sylver did his best to ignore them as continued silently running down the stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs, there was a human sized door on the right, and a giant closed gate on the left. 2 of the leaders disappeared, and by the time the 2 that remained reached the bottom of the stairs, the 2 who had disappeared were in the process of pushing the ridiculously thick human sized door open.

It was at least a meter thick, as was the wall, and as Sylver passed through the doorway, he felt as if his face was about to melt from the sheer quantity of Ki that made up the dormant barrier.

Sylver was so focused on the door, that he very nearly bumped into the man who had been ahead of him. The group had come to a complete halt. The ceiling had some sort of liquid flowing along it, that was glowing, and illuminated the large hallway they were standing in with a relaxing blue light.

The 4 leaders were standing on the right side of the door, while everyone else, including Hound, stood on the left side.

“Good luck,” one of the men leaders said, Sylver couldn’t even tell which one, there was some sort of augmentation to their voice that made it impossible to figure out which of the 3 had spoken.

“Follow me,” Hound barked, his voice wasn’t his, he had the same augmentation the leader had.

The remaining people wordlessly followed the man, and after maybe 2 minutes of running, they arrived at another meter-thick door. It was already open, and strangely enough, there was a very faint smell of bananas in the air.

Before them, there was an enormous city, identical to the one Sylver had been in when he was hunting the Blue Tiger heirs, save for the fact that some of the buildings in this city had bright glowing lights inside of them.

“INTRUDERS!” a voice screamed somewhere far away.