If Sylver could vomit, he would have.

His surroundings spun, swirled, and folded in on themselves for what felt like the longest second of his life. He had shivers running down his spine, up his legs and felt as if there was a giant ball of metal pulling his stomach down.

Sylver’s legs gave out and Faust had to grab him to stop him from falling to the floor.

“Yeah, thought that might happen,” Faust said awkwardly as he pulled his hand away from Sylver, and slapped him hard on the back.

The nauseating feeling disappeared immediately but left behind a faint itching feeling in all the places where Sylver had stitches.

With his legs working again, Sylver let go of Faust and began to limp down the spiralling tunnel.

After a few seconds, he managed to evolve his limp into a jog.

“I meant cut a hole in it or something,” Sylver said, as he and Faust made their way down the tunnel.

“I tried. Chipped my sword,” Faust said.

True enough, the curved blade he was holding in his hand was missing its tip, and about 4 fingers' worth of edge.

“So… you can teleport,” Sylver said with just a hint of disapproval in his voice.

There was a moment's pause during which Faust decided that his explanation would be wasted on Sylver.

“Something like that,” Faust said.

They ran down the tunnel without speaking for a while, and gradually the square-shaped holes that had been used to dig the tunnel became smaller and smaller, which in turn made the tunnel smoother with every passing second.

By the time the tunnel stopped going downwards, the cubes were near imperceptible. Even when he ran his fingers along the wall, Sylver couldn’t feel any bumps, as far as he was concerned, the wall was smooth.

“Who was that guy?” Faust asked in an attempt to change the subject.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“Just some guy. Your guess is as good as mine,” Sylver said with a shrug.

During the last couple of seconds inside the sphere, Sylver had felt magic gathering behind him, but luckily for them, the vampire didn’t have enough time to finish whatever it was he was doing. Sylver was curious as to how the whole thing functioned, but he had more pressing matters to deal with right now.

Not to mention he hoped the zombies he left behind would be enough to deal with the vamp.

By the time Sylver and Faust reached the end of the tunnel, the walls were vibrating.

Sylver’s face felt itchy as Faust armoured himself with his Ki.

The air was as stale as air could get, and so full of moisture that droplets were gathering on the mana field Sylver had surrounded himself with.

The first thing that Sylver saw was the heart.

It was the shape of a fat squashed butterfly, and as big as two mansions stacked on top of each other. Thick dark chains were wrapped around it, and suspended it from the ceiling, as the heart flesh weakly shivered against them.

Pitch-black spikes sat embedded into every visible surface, most dry, but more than a few were dripping with blood.

Sylver lowered his gaze and saw that the blood dripping from the heart was flowing upwards, up the white 4-sided pyramid. The blood flowed up the channels and disappeared into the pyramid’s peak.

As his eyes adjusted, Sylver saw a barely visible beam of darkness coming out of the pyramid’s peak, straight up, through the heart, and then it disappeared into the ceiling.  

Sylver’s eyesight was good enough that he could tell immediately that the “bricks” that made up the pyramid were made from giant turtle bones.

The walls were so far away that Sylver didn’t initially see them. The mere thought that such a large open space could exist inside someone disturbed Sylver in a way he couldn’t quite put into words.

“What should I do?” Faust asked.

Sylver had to wait for his racing mind to slow down before he answered.

“Stay close,” he said, as he forced his legs to walk towards the barely beating heart.

Sylver wanted to go home.

He wanted to have a drink with Edmund, and then he wanted to fall asleep in a comfortable and warm bed and have breakfast while watching the suns rise.

But instead of doing that, he was walking towards a thing he had never seen before, and most certainly didn’t understand.

He was frightened.

Plain and simple.

This was the sort of situation he would think twice about involving himself in when he was an unkillable Silver Lich.

As he was, he was an ant trying to bring down a human castle.

And yet, Sylver’s legs continued to walk, one foot after the other, while his mind took inventory of the tools available to it and tried to find a way to use them to stop a demi-god from being sacrificed.

Faust was blessed with ignorance, he couldn’t feel the mana the thing was emanating, and he didn’t really understand the threat they were up against.

Sophia said that she needed to wake Tuli up, to stop the Moon Demon from drowning the world. The god also specified that the drowning would start at the next winter solstice.

So even if they failed, nothing would happen until the winter solstice. Sylver and Edmund could use Lola’s connections to recruit a bunch of mages, and then figure out a way to stop it from raining.

So worst case scenario, they could still find a way to resolve everything.

Save for Tuli being sacrificed. Waking up a comatose demigod was one thing, but reviving one was so difficult that Sylver felt confident in saying it was impossible.

As Sylver approached the pyramid he began to see the framework carved into it. Sigils and circuits that were most certainly not from this realm, but the more worrying thing was that there was something familiar about them.

He followed the framework with his eyes and found that he was successfully guessing what the next sigil was going to be.

Faust hesitated for a split second before he followed Sylver up the pyramid. The rocks were slippery with blood, and more disturbingly, the bones themselves were warm.

When they reached the top, Sylver’s fear was replaced by an emotion that doesn’t quite have a name.

The “peak” of the pyramid was a flat square, from which a dark metal beam came out. The beam was about the width of a wine bottle, and while it was subtle, it was ever so slowly tuning.

But that wasn’t the part that was making Sylver feel whatever it was he was feeling.

On the edge of the flat surface, there lay a metal-bound book. The metal was tarnished and the latch that was meant to keep it closed had been torn off. The pages were glued together from the blood that had ended up soaking into them.

Sylver reached out with the tip of his dagger and pried the bloodied book off the makeshift table. It remained open, as he flipped it over, and stared at the empty circular hole on the front cover. Sylver heard a crunch when Faust shifted his weight, and they both looked down to see a small shard of glass. It was hard to tell unless you were actively looking for it, but the piece of glass was the shape of a coin.

Or rather, the shape meant to hold something that was the shape of a coin.

Sylver looked around, up at the almost dead impaled heart, down at the pyramid of bones, and he could suddenly see the “logic” behind it. Enough to at least understand that the ritual had been started prematurely.

Sylver had to wonder if Poppy knew what Nautis was doing.

If she was the one who gave him the book.

If this was the reason she decided to leave Chrys a parting gift, before leaving this realm.

Sylver also wondered if Poppy had any more laying around. Waiting for someone gullible and stupid enough to follow the instructions inside.

Sylver opened his mouth to speak, but the only sound he could produce was a low-pitched gurgle.

“What?” Faust asked, as Sylver tried again, but couldn’t focus his mind enough to properly manipulate his sound-making organ.

“Syl?” Faust asked.

Sylver’s response was an incoherent mumble. Every second word was a slur, and Sylver would later be grateful beyond words that Faust didn’t understand the language Sylver had spoken because even for Sylver, the things he said were bad.

“-bastards…” Sylver cracked his knuckles, broke them, to be more accurate, and spoke with a much calmer tone of voice. “I am going to fucking kill them,” Sylver said.

His robe had lost its tidy fluffy appearance and now looked like it was melting off his body.

Sylver heard someone laugh behind him, and as he gradually turned, he saw a figure wearing a white robe, along with a long hood that was sewn shut at the front, to hide the face. The figure was floating in the air and was on the same level as Sylver and Faust.

Immediately Sylver knew it wasn’t human. The way the shoulders were set, the way the hips were leaning forward too much compared to the perfectly straight back, and things were moving underneath the white fabric. Best guess, Sylver was looking at a swarm of a couple of thousand tiny insects that were doing a poor job of mimicking a human being’s body.

“Glad you could make it!” the figure, Nautis, probably, said.

Obviously, it was Nautis, Sylver could feel it in his hearts that the “man” he was looking at had at one point in the past been Nautis. It was like stepping into dogshit in the middle of the night, even if you couldn’t see or smell anything, you knew what you stepped into.

A glowing line appeared on Nautis’ neck, and with a great big gasp, he clutched at his throat with his hands. He coughed, and shook, as he tried to take a breath and-

Sylver kicked Faust’s sword out of his hand, then kicked with his foot again, and discarded the boot he had been wearing.

Nautis’ laboured gargling evolved into a chuckle, and then a full-blown laugh.

He started to speak as he released his neck, but the explosive Sylver had thrown exploded before he could get the first word out.

Faust’s sword clinked, the sound of metal that wasn’t meant to be bent made when it was bent, and the leather that made up Sylver’s boot made a squeaking noise, as it melted into the floor.

Although neither the sword nor the boot were melting, they were being deconstructed, into barely visible cubes, that were instantly replaced by equally tiny cubes made from the bone bricks the boot and sword were laying on. With every passing second more and more of Faust’s sword became white, as did Sylver’s boot.

The floor on the other hand gained the rough outline of the sword and boot laying on top of it.

Now, normally, this kind of attack wouldn’t be much of an issue. Mages with dimensional magic tended to do exactly this sort of shit, it was one of their more commonly used tactics.

Under normal circumstances, a dimensional mage would need a lot of mana to interfere with a living person’s body, but given that Nautis was working with a demon, it wasn’t that farfetched to assume that he had something that allowed him to ignore that rule.

Sylver could survive having his body parts replaced, as could Faust, probably, but what could be a problem was having their primal energy field messed with. Especially for someone like Sylver, whose soul was spread throughout his body. The only reason he knew what was happening to Faust’s sword, was that it had been close enough for Sylver to feel its primal energy tearing to pieces.

If Nautis’ spell hit any part of him, even cutting off the infected part wouldn’t do anything, since Sylver could not cut a piece of his soul off him. Not without losing his mind in the process, and potentially just straight up “dying.”

Sylver shoved Faust out of the way as Nautis disappeared inside the cloud of smoke and materialized a half step away from where Sylver had been standing a moment prior. Nautis’ hands were raised in a limp-wristed attempt at grabbing something.

Because he didn’t need to grab anyone, just making contact would be enough, and he knew it.

“Syl?” Faust shouted, as Sylver continued to back away from Nautis, and kept his eyes glued to the laughing man.

The spell that attached Faust’s soul to his body would, in theory, deactivate the moment his soul was damaged. Or it was possible that Nautis’ spell would travel back to Faust’s real body and kill him.

Or mess him up to the point it wouldn’t be right to call him “Faust.”

Just as Sylver began to construct a plan of action, blood rained down onto him.

Sylver looked up and saw that the spikes had retracted, and the holes they left behind were leaking blood with every single weak contraction the heart made. The pyramid hummed with power and began to vibrate with so much force that Sylver just barely managed to maintain his footing on the slippery slanted surface.

“Seems like you got here just in time,” Nautis said.

And as the pyramid began to slowly shift towards its final position, Sylver couldn’t help but agree with him.