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Ch229-SECRET TUNNEL

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Lion clicked his tongue, Hound cursed under his breath, Owl pinched the bridge of his nose, and Aurick opened Sonso’s book and flipped through the blank pages.

“Is this good or bad?” Sylver asked.

“It’s either very good…” Aurick said, as he turned the page, and made a face, “or very very bad…”

“Of course it is… I say we keep going,” Sylver offered, as Aurick, Owl, and Abby walked over to him.

“You believe that the emperor and his guard are still disorganized,” Abby said.

“They will all be off guard either way. Assuming that wasn’t a completely random lightning bolt,” Owl said, in a tone that suggested that he didn’t believe that was possible.

“Even if he’s stronger, waiting wouldn’t benefit us. Well, it would, but I highly doubt he’s just sitting on his ass watching everything around him fall apart,” Sylver offered without much in the way of confidence.

The honest truth was, he didn’t know what to do.

In his mind, the Ki nullifying rain evened the playing field, just enough for him to win, and add Aurick and his group to that, and Sylver’s victory was all but assured.

On the other hand, Sylver’s gut seemed to be in the process of performing a gymnastic routine. Sadly, its flips didn’t seem to have a single direction, the horrid feeling was vague as if his gut had already pointed everything it needed to out and was now waiting for its idiot owner to put the puzzle pieces together.

Sylver didn’t even possess an actual digestive tract to blame indigestion.

He wasn’t walking into a trap. Because that was a sort of cold stinging pain, whereas the one Sylver was currently feeling was almost warm, and blunt. Like someone had punched him right in the liver.

“Is everyone in agreement?” Owl asked.

Aurick was the only one who nodded straight away, whereas Sylver and Abby showed their age by thinking it over for a few seconds.

Sylver worried that the blood wouldn’t stay Ki nullifying forever. And while it’s possible the next, whatever this is, would be even more beneficial, there wasn’t a way of knowing…

Well…

There was one way of knowing…

Sylver reached into his robe, and very gently, placed his hand over the glowing scrap of paper. He tapped his fingers against it, as he considered the wisdom of this, and tried to talk himself out of it.

Best case scenario… The dragon tells me the emperor’s weakness…Gives me a weapon that perfectly counters whatever the emperor has... And it confirms that Aurick was talking bullshit?

Worst case scenario…

If the dragon is too locked up to send Sylver back, it wouldn’t teleport him inside in the first place…

On the other hand…

With so few chains, there are probably a countless number of gaps…

“Actually… I’m going to try something. If I’m not back in, let’s say 5 minutes, go on without me,” Sylver said, as he fully grabbed the piece of paper.

“This isn’t what we agreed to,” Owl said, as Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“I might have a direct path into wherever the emperor is. Keyword being might,” Sylver explained, as Owl and Aurick, in perfect sync, reached up with their hand and scratched the side of their chin.

He could almost see Owl having a conversation with Sylver in his head, and as the hypothetical Sylver refused to answer question after question, and eventually just did whatever it is he had initially planned to do, hypothetical Owl could do little but sigh and let him go.

Just as Sylver was about to walk away, Owl reached out with his shovel-sized hand and grabbed him by the shoulder. His grip was gentle, but with the sort of firmness that implied that he could easily tear Sylver’s arm right off.

“Don’t kill the emperor,” Owl said simply.

Either he thought he didn’t need to bother with a threat, or he assumed Sylver was smart enough to understand the situation he was in.

Sylver stared into Owl’s milky white eyes, and some sort of pride-obsessed piece of him tried to goad him into detaching the blind man’s head from his body. The blood messed with positive magic, and even with Hound around, Owl would be dead before the lanky bastard could even react.

Thankfully, for everyone present, Sylver knew when to give in to his urges, and when to suck it up and stay on task. Help them capture and kill the emperor, and go home with Edmund, that was the goal.

“Alright…” Sylver said.

Owl’s hand made a clicking sound as he released his hold on Sylver’s shoulder as if the joints in his fingers were older than they had any right to be.

A moment of silence passed, before Sylver turned around, and walked away from the group. Once he was out of sight, he took the piece of glowing green paper out of his robe and stared at it for a few seconds.

He didn’t even finish saying the first syllable of “QUESTION” as he felt the space around him twist and twirl.

 

***

 

There is a metric fuckton of good reasons as to why everyone should be afraid of dragons.

And while Sylver was the very last person who needed a reminder as to why these fire-breathing creatures are as feared as they are, he got one anyway.

As did Ria, given that she audibly gasped.

The dragon’s body hadn’t changed since he had last seen it. It still looked almost like a comically wide, fat, scaled, 3-headed mouse.

But its physical shape couldn’t be less relevant.

It wasn’t doing anything that could be compared to a wild animal, it wasn’t snarling, prowling, it wasn’t a tiger ready to pounce, it wasn’t twitching in excitement, it didn’t drag its hoof against the ground in warning, the dragon just sat there.

The way a mighty king might haphazardly rest on his throne, the dragon didn’t literally have a leg kicked up onto the throne’s armrest, but it may as well have.

What made Sylver completely forget every language he had ever learned, wasn’t the dragon itself, but the bubble of magic lazily floating between two of the dragon’s whispering heads.

There were no words adequate enough to describe what Sylver both saw, and felt, as the two heads effortlessly added layer upon layer to the already incomprehensibly complex sphere of spell work.

For a moment Sylver couldn’t find it in himself to stop gazing at the mass of magic. It was as if he was a child again, watching Nyx demonstrate what she claimed he would eventually be capable of doing.

Sylver just stood there, an apprentice painter, proud of being able to get the shadows right on his drawing of a pear, as Nyx dragged her brush along the canvas and created yet another masterpiece.

The gap in abilities felt identical right now.

On some level, Sylver understood that if the magic the dragon was using was anywhere near his field of study, he would have been able to decipher at least a tiny piece of it.

But whatever that concoction of spellcraft was, it wasn’t necromancy.

Although, even if it was, the likelihood of Sylver’s extremely specific brand of pure dark necromancy, having even the tiniest slither of overlap with a dragon’s interpretation of necromancy, was slim to none.

“Say something,” Ria calmly all but shouted into Sylver’s ear. She sounded lifeless.

It was only now that Sylver realized that one of the 3 heads was staring right at him. It was the one that didn’t have a mouth. And now that Sylver had been pulled out of his transfixed state, he saw that the head with the milky eyes had 4 giant scorch marks on its face.

As if someone had whipped it with a red hot piece of barbed wire.

Sylver’s whole body froze up once again, as he ransacked his brain for the few words he could remember in the ancient language the dragon spoke.

“BIG FIRE NEGATIVE BOTTOM DANGER NEGATIVE PERSON?” Sylver asked.

The mute dragon tilted its head to the side, and one of the heads behind it spoke in its place.

“Something something something something MOUNTAIN something something TIME,” the blind head responded. He got a whole sentence worth of words, and could only understand 2.

Sylver scratched the side of his head, and closed his eyes for a moment, as he tried to force the information rattling around somewhere in the deepest reaches of his mind, into the forefront.

When he found nothing of value, he opened his eyes again, and very carefully, started playing charades.

Sylver created an illusion of the book in Aurick’s possession. He then created an illusion of Aurick holding the book. But even as Sylver pointed with his hand towards the cover, the one with the 7 suns on it, the mute head didn’t react.

Sylver moved the illusion of Aurick and the book off to the side.

He created an illusionary Eira, and floating above it, summoned glowing spheres to represent the suns. Slowly Sylver-

“What’s that?” Ria asked, with a tendril stretched towards the illusion that was meant to represent Eira. Granted, the illusion wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to understand what it was supposed to be.

“Eira,” Sylver answered, as he tried to come up with a good image to represent a demon.

“Eira is a donut with a wall along the outer edge?” Ria asked as Sylver created a dark blue human, with 3 sets of horns on its head. The blue demon lifted its arms towards the suns, and as it lowered them, the suns floated towards Eira’s surface.

“We’ll discuss this later,” Sylver whispered under his breath.

Ria made a series of clicking noises, as the mute dragon’s eyes narrowed the slightest amount. The mouthless head moved closer to Sylver’s illusionary puppet show and stared at the image of the human-shaped demon pulling the suns down onto Eira’s surface.

Sylver flinched as he felt the mute dragon’s magic replace Sylver’s.

The images remained as they were, except the dragon moved the suns around, and placed them in a very familiar position.

They were lined up.

It was the day the suns were at their brightest, and the day there appeared to only be 1 extra-bright sun.

Sylver watched as the blue demon flicked his hand, and the sun at the back of the line, the one furthest away from Eira, was yanked towards the slowly spinning donut planet.

As if they were dominos, the suns collided with one another, and in the end, a beam of light the diameter of the smallest sun made a hole in the donut-shaped planet. All the way through…

Sylver couldn’t put into words what he felt at that very moment.

On the one hand, he was thrilled to know Aurick’s book wasn’t the book. Eira wasn’t going to be engulfed by an invisible brainwashing force. The dragon would have reacted to the book if that had been the case.

But on the other hand, the fucking Sun Demon was real.

The two opposing emotions clashed and mixed, and the result was a momentary sense of relief. Maybe a full second’s worth. Possibly even 2.

Sylver must have made a face because the mute dragon looked more confused than it had been when Sylver spoke at it in his broken precursor Eirish.

Instead of explaining that a demon capable of firing a beam of light powerful enough to vaporize sections of Eira, was a lesser threat than what Sylver thought the book was, Sylver just nodded at the dragon and moved along.

Aurick didn’t know what the Sun Demon was waiting for or chose not to tell Sylver, but at least now Sylver knew how long he had. It had a different name in every culture, but the local name for it was the “summer solstice.”

The summer solstice is celebrated every 6 years.

Thankfully, the real summer solstice occurs only once every 66 years.

The “science” behind it, so to speak, was that the smaller suns acted as a kind of amplifier for the larger suns further away. Sort of like a magnifying glass, except with significantly more light-magic specific jargon involved.

The summer solstice was a special day for a number of reasons.

Apart from extending the amount of daylight people had, the summer solstice also tended to be used to aid high-tier light magic rituals. Removing curses, healing, and just about everything that didn’t involve dark magic got a slight boost.

The opposite was also true, if a dark mage was weak and incompetent enough, even one of the 6-year summer solstices could interfere with their casting, or downright block it. As someone too powerful, and too capable to be affected by it, Sylver often times used this to his advantage to attack unsuspecting positive mages.

The problem was, Sylver didn’t know when the next real summer solstice was going to happen in Eira… He knew the next one was going to occur in about a year, but he was fairly certain Lola would have mentioned it if it was the 66-year one.

As slowly and politely as possible, Sylver gestured towards his illusions, and as the dragon blinked at him, he started trying to explain what he couldn’t say in words.

The fact that he’d seen the current emperor in person made things easier.

Sylver showed the emperor hiding inside the mountain and had an illusionary Sylver walk through the main gate, and defeat several illusory guards, before the robe-wearing necromancer reached the emperor’s room, and killed him.

Sylver then reset the illusion and showed the robe-wearing necromancer enter a secret tunnel behind the emperor’s palace. The necromancer traveled through the tunnel, reached the emperor’s room, caught the emperor off guard, and killed him.

The mute dragon head didn’t move for a few seconds.

Once again, it took the reins of Sylver’s magic out of his hands and altered Sylver’s illusion. The mountain on which the emperor’s palace resided gained a ridiculous amount of detail, and then it turned translucent.

There were several tunnels, about 20, most of them went towards the white ring, but there were 2 that stood out because the dragon made them bright red.

One connected a very large area in the middle of the Schlagen mountains, where the 3 headed dragon seemed to be, to a room inside the emperor’s palace. Going by the shape of the room, and more specifically, the door, it was a vault of some kind.

That tunnel had a spot where it seemed to be less than a meter away from intersecting a different tunnel that led into a room inside the emperor’s palace. Once Sylver understood what the dragon was suggesting, the mute dragon showed an illusion of Sylver traveling through the two tunnels, coming out of the room inside the palace, and stabbing the emperor in the back.

The mute dragon head seemed, in a certain sense of the word, pleased.

But before Sylver could ask anything, its eyes narrowed. The two heads behind it stopped whispering, and the only thing Sylver could hear was dead silence.

A half second later, Sylver felt a shockwave tear through his body, and at the same time, felt the dragon’s magic blunting a very large portion of the force.

The ceiling of the cave made a loud creaking sound, and the next thing Sylver knew, he had been flung away from the dragon.

Sylver didn’t remember passing through a door, and yet, he was standing behind a bright gold door.

He couldn’t see what was behind the door, but the ancient dragon’s soul was very hard to miss, even with a fancy door separating them. The tunnel walls were made of tarnished gold, but it wasn’t smooth, it looked like someone had splattered the stone walls with liquid gold.

“I’ll let you know when we’re close to the intersection,” Ria said calmly.

Although, describing her voice as “calm” was disingenuous. She sounded as if she was undead. The monotone pattern of speech, a complete and total lack of emotion, if Sylver wasn’t in a rush, he would have sat her down to make sure she was alright.

Instead of doing that, he simply started to run. There were small cracks in the ceiling, and blood was leaking down from them, which resulted in Sylver almost slipping a couple of times.

It was hard to say if the dragon somehow understood that Sylver had planned to do as it had suggested, or if it had assumed its plan was infinitely better than anything Sylver could have come up with, but regardless of the reason, Sylver was exactly where he wanted to be.