Ch070-Friends, Enemies, And The Rest

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Ch070-Friends, Enemies, And The Rest

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The notifications stopped showing up after a certain point. Sylver initially assumed there was a distance limitation, but even when he made the harpies let a few through to get closer to him, he still didn’t get a notification for defeating the proto zombies.

And it took him an embarrassingly long while to figure out why.

It was because he had already killed them. As a necromancer, a person who specializes in working with the dead, Sylver should have realized this much much sooner.

On the one hand, Sylver gained a newfound respect for his invisible, possibly automated, opponent. One of the most powerful features of undead was the sheer amount of damage they could take and still keep moving. Shambling armies of undead weren’t shambling for the fun of it. They very often missed a step and broke their feet off, and ended up walking on their shinbones, their feet left behind them, to be trampled into the ground, never to be seen again.

Undead made from fresh corpses were great, they didn’t need a whole lot of guidance when it came to marching or fighting. Undead made from skeletons and, what could only be described as remains, needed more concentration and effort than they were usually worth.

The rare times that Sylver created a zombie army for himself, he ended up having to discard nearly a fifth of it by the time they arrived at their destination. Mostly because he had to take them apart for parts to make sure the remaining four-fifths were in fighting condition. It was slow and tedious work, and only hardened Sylver’s stance that shades were the most superior form of undead.

On the other hand, as a person having to deal with such a resourceful necromancer, it was infuriatingly annoying.

Thankfully with Sabo and the harpies handling everything, Sylver didn’t even have to look at the recycled proto zombies, much less kill them himself.

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Sylver leaned down to look at the thrice dead proto zombie. They died once when they were alive. Then again when Sylver killed them when they were proto zombies. And a third, or possibly fourth, time now.

Except Sylver didn’t kill this one. And neither did Sabo or the harpies, someone had frozen and shattered them.

Recently enough that they were still partially frozen.

“There is a direct and physical path to this item, at least at the moment,” Sylver quoted, as he stood back up from his examination and looked ahead.

“Lola did say there were only a few bodies found, and that a huge portion of the force was missing. Doesn’t mean they all died,” Spring said, as the harpies returned from scouting ahead and sat perched on Sabo’s bulky shoulders.

Sylver consulted the map again and approached the wall that wasn’t supposed to be there. To no one’s surprise, his hand passed through the false image and he very easily stepped through it. The room hidden behind the wall had a single door on the other side of it.

There was something written on it, but the only thing Sylver could focus on at the moment was the fact that the door was wide open, and the singular chest behind it was open and visibly empty.

“Knowing the demon, quite literally the minute it said, “at the moment” someone’s hand was already touching the [Dead Man’s Last Stand],” Sylver said, as he turned into smoke and made sure the chest was empty.

“You’re handling this uncharacteristically well,” Spring mentioned with a very careful casualness so as not to accidentally tip whatever was keeping Sylver so calm.

“Not my first time getting fucked over by a demon… But this is good,” Sylver said, as he walked out of the false wall and started to walk down the corridor again, leaving the fake wall and door behind.

“How is this good?” Spring asked with genuine curiosity.

“It’s a sign that Poppy’s effect wore off. Or it doesn’t reach this far down, or that Nameless and company are far enough away that I’m no longer affected by it. And quite honestly, I was expecting this. And because we don’t have a whole lot of choice but continue going down the corridors and get to the end of the crypt, there’s still a chance whoever took the [Dead Man’s Last Stand]might still be here,” Sylver said, as he ran his hand down the side of his cloaks cuff.

It was the closest thing he had to a nervous tick. Even if he was furious, and not nervous. Sadly Sylver was all too aware that nothing would be achieved by getting angry.

“I see…” Spring said as he followed after. The shade knew the man was lying. He was too close to him to not feel the bottled-up bubbling rage, but at the same time understood that if he chose to pretend everything was alright, he would pretend along with him.

*

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Sylver and Spring walked in silence for a while.

They passed frozen corpse after frozen corpse, each one appearing to be slightly more freshly killed than the ones before. Sylver was moving without anything getting in his way, whoever came through here appeared to have had to fight their way through.

Although the question did arise, why did they bother? Sylver was planning to just walk on the ceiling to avoid them, the only thing these zombies could do was throw their swords at him, and they never even did that.

Creating a creature that can use ranged attacks is significantly harder than creating one that can use melee. Even naturally created undead very rarely used ranged attacks. It required too many moving pieces, too much functioning grey matter, just using a melee weapon and putting everything into speed and strength was much easier, and more effective.

This of course made opponents that focused on ranged attacks nearly impossible to deal with, but that’s where the numerical advantage came in. Take whatever damage is dealt, and simply swarm them, like ants.

Not to mention, creating an undead that can accurately aim is a massive undertaking. Although the necromancer who had created this crypt had managed to create Sabo and the harpies, so perhaps the purpose of the proto zombies spread out throughout the corridors wasn’t to kill but slow down?

After a certain point, Sylver stopped reforming into a physical form and simply floated up near the ceiling at a comfortable pace. He was slightly faster than if he were walking or running, but this was mainly because the ceiling was wonderfully flat and polished, and Sylver essentially glided against it.

More and more dead zombie corpses showed up, and when Sylver’s path went left, courtesy of the path right being blocked by a giant wall of darkness, changed from their usual frozen and shattered shape into shredded and demolished chunks. Sylver briefly examined them as well, but couldn’t quite put his finger on what would have created such damage. It appeared both blunt and sharp, possibly an ax, or a mace, or a morning star.

But more importantly, all the zombie blood on the floor gave Sylver a bit more hope. There were footprints in some of it, 4 different people as far as Sylver could tell. Sylver regretted his lack of knowledge in the subject, given how rare it was for anyone he was tracking to ever leave footprints.

But he knew enough to say with certainty that at least 4 people passed through here. With the high likelihood of teleportation or someone floating or flying, Sylver wasn’t able to say with certainty how many there were exactly, only that there were at least 4 that had to walk through the blood-filled corridor.

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Sylver stood still and stared directly at the wall. The bricks were made in that same oddly smooth dark stone, had the same pattern like carving in them, and even the mana looked and felt the same as the bricks under Sylver’s feet.

And yet he could put his hand through it as if they weren’t there. More than that, the shades couldn’t tell it wasn’t a wall. When Spring materialized and tried to push his hand through as Sylver had done, he was touching a solid wall. The harpies had no issue passing through it, and neither did Sabo. The wall didn’t exist for them, but it did for Spring and the other 50 or so shades.

Sylver thought about it for a few seconds, and very carefully pushed his face through the wall that wasn’t a wall.

The hidden room was identical to the one Sylver had been in previously, down to the propped open and empty chest, and the wide-open door. Being slightly more genuinely relaxed and accepting of the situation, Sylver turned into smoke and traveled to look at the writing on the door.

There were three lines etched onto the outside, each one with a different number of characters and length, and two characters at the very bottom that matched the ones above but looked new. Sylver gently placed his hand against the door and sent a pulse of mana through it.

He felt some of the mana return, felt the door, the surprisingly simple locking mechanism inside of it, the sheet of metal used for the carved in letters, and lastly a wire, for lack of a better word, stretching so far away that Sylver waited for an entire minute, but didn’t feel a response from the mana traveling down it.

Repeating this a few more times Sylver remembered where he had seen this before. He groaned as he stood up properly and started to write down all the characters he could see.

“This is a challenge crypt. It all makes sense, the weak zombies littering the corridors, the fact that the fights have been largely one on one, or at least evenish, the question marks and appraisal being useless…” Sylver said, almost biting the end of his pencil as he stared at the characters in his notebook and tried to tie meaning to them.

“A challenge crypt?” Spring asked, checking inside of the chest just to be sure.

It was empty.

“They’re usually built when the deceased doesn’t have any next of kin. Tribe leaders, sorcerers, kings, queens, basically anyone who has something that other people would want after their death but doesn’t want to just give it to them. The whole thing is built to test the person entering it, to see if they’re deserving of whatever is at the end of it. It’s good because that means that there won’t be anything objectively impassable… Probably,” Sylver said, rewriting the characters and sorting them by the number of strokes, and then by complexity.

“But?” Spring asked.

“But the problem is that they’re built with someone in mind. A prophecy, a specific set of skills, a certain outlook on life, it can be anything. You either need to be strong enough to force your way through it or be the correct person for it. There are ways to trick it, if you can guess what the owner of the crypt is after, but…” Sylver explained, looking down at the square-looking characters spread out all over his page.

“But you can’t understand what’s written here, so you can’t even begin to guess,” Spring finished, as he took Sylver’s closed notebook and tucked it away.

“It doesn’t look local. But I’m not getting an earth feeling from these either, could be one of the elf heroes. Not dwarf, they hate necromancy too much, so either elf, gnome, or something else. All the ‘half shades’ used bladed weapons instead of blunt ones, so a race without easy access to healing magic. Or a naturally fast regeneration, they usually use the weapons they’re most afraid of,” Sylver thought out loud, looking down into the spike-filled trap near the door entrance, as well as the flat stone block up above it.

“My money is on human; I’ve never seen elves use traps without any mana in them. Then again, this is exactly the kind of thing gnomes would do, make the challenger think the whole thing was built by humans or some other race, to trick them into being unprepared later on,” Sylver said, slowly looking around and trying to think if the architecture had any awkwardness around it.

Every race had small unsaid rules when it came to their architecture, that didn’t translate onto paper. Meaning an elf had no issue telling a genuine elven wall apart from a perfect fake, but couldn’t explain whythe nearly identical copy was fake.

It just felt wrong.

Sylver had the same feeling here, although he didn’t even know which architecture, he was comparing it to, for it to feel wrong to him. There was simply something off about it.

He ultimately decided that it didn’t particularly matter. Knowing which race had built it wouldn’t help him in any way, considering he couldn’t read a single word of their language.

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One positive thing about these proto zombies was the fact that they were predictable. All zombies were, to an extent. Natural zombies were a completely separate matter, but zombies created through necromancy had a limited amount of information they could handle.

Some subsects of necromancy had an eerie similarity to the magic alchemists used to animate their golems. The main difference being that golems functioned solely off the mana provided by their creator, while zombies could be made to be self-contained systems.

But the issue with them being self-contained, usually meant that it was difficult to control them directly. Golems didn’t need any instructions, they functioned off their creator’s mana, and would do whatever their creators intended for them to do. Zombies on the other hand had to be told. Very often, well in advance.

Sylver got around it in the same way he had with his shades, by making their priority be always checking to see if they got any new orders. In the past Sylver would twitch his fingers in a certain manner, to get a specific shade to listen to him, but now he had Spring directing the majority of them.

He still sometimes gave them manual orders, but with Spring’s direct connection to Sylver’s soul and thoughts, and the unexpected usefulness of [Dead’s Dogma], Sylver very rarely had to do more than snap his fingers, or mutter under his breath.

But zombies didn’t have a direct connection to their creator, they had a set of instructions. Sylver guessed that the creator was using something in their surroundings to give them the appearance of unpredictability, to make sure they didn’t all swing their swords in the same manner.

Sylver liked tying his zombie’s attacks to how many steps they had taken, but quite honestly had never tried very hard to make their instructions any more complex than that. There was simply no point, shades were better in every single way imaginable, 99% of the time. And when it came to making armies, Sylver usually had commanders in charge of the mindless undead, handing out orders on the fly and matching their attacks to the situation at hand.

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Sylver continued to lazily drift up against the ceiling. Faster than he would travel if running, but slower than traveling while inside of Ulvic. Sadly, with the potential of magic traps catching him off guard, that wasn’t an option. He didn’t think there weren’t any left in the chaos left behind by the people ahead of him but didn’t dare to risk it.

It was one thing if he could see a trap coming, he could arrange the smoke so he effectively dodged out of the way, but he was one hit from his heart being separated from his body. The connection between the smoke clouds could be minuscule. If it was needed, Sylver could make himself as thin as a human hair if he concentrated on it, but the issue with that was the if the hair is cut, whatever half doesn’t have Sylver’s core, is effectively severed from Sylver’s body.

If the smoke is cut using holy magic or silver the separation would be quite permanent. In the same way, Sylver’s attacks couldn’t be healed without a great deal of time, mana, and effort, any attack made on Sylver with silver, could take weeks, even months, to fully heal.

Sylver’s path through the crypt was fairly straightforward. Whenever he came to an intersection, one path was always sealed off behind a giant flat wall of darkness, and the other was wide open, inviting even. Sometimes the corridor was angled upwards, sometimes downwards, mostly left, and very rarely right, but throughout it all, he was constantly moving towards the same general area.

In some sections, proto zombies were standing around, waiting for him. But even after getting Sabo and the harpies to kill some of them, he still wasn’t getting any experience and didn’t want to bother. Sabo was big enough, and strong enough, that he didn’t need to fight the slow-moving zombies, he barrelled right through them, shoving them off to the side.

None of them died, of course, their skin might have rotted and fallen off, but their bones were much stronger than a normal person. But by the time they managed to get back up, Sylver, Sabo, and the harpies were long gone.

Sylver stopped twice to eat and have something close to a nap, while Spring kept a lookout and directed Sabo and the harpies to handle any proto zombies that got too close. Oddly enough they didn’t seem all that interested in coming over to where he was resting, Sylver’s best guess was that they had orders to stick to their territory.

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Sylver took a deep breath and double-checked all his weapons were in their proper place. The daggers on his back, interlocking one another to cover his spine and neck, darts in a lattice around his arms and legs, to function as armor in the event of something slashing, caltrops hidden around the bottom edges of his cloak and robe, to drop behind him if he was running, and the remaining grenades hidden near his midsection, the area he would have the easiest time defending.

Sylver was ready. He was prepared, he was armed, he was full of adrenaline and could feel his inhuman pulse behind his eyeballs, threatening to shove them out of his head.

Sylver stared at a small ball of light with one eye, while keeping the other closed, and at Spring’s word, started to run.

He had Spring synchronize everyone, so he, Sabo, and the harpies all passed through the one-way barrier at the same time.

Sylver could feel the faint light on the tip of his nose before his eyes even crossed over, and he closed the eye he had prepared for the dark and kept the light accustomed eye wide open.

But even with that, he was still caught off guard.

Maybe 40 people, all in various states of undress, sitting around, sleeping, eating, playing cards, all so engrossed in their activities, that not one of them noticed Sylver entering.

Sylver’s eyes darted left and right, counting out the people and mentally assigning the level of threat they posed, compared to the distance between them. Not counting a few of the ones furthest away, Sylver was oddly certain he could handle this heavily damaged group of adventurers. Some didn’t even look all that much like adventurers.

He didn’t recognize any of them, except a very tall green-haired woman, sitting next to a very large dark-haired woman, sitting next to a normal-sized woman, what was barely visible with all the dark bandages covering her body.

“Edna?” Sylver asked, his confused and quiet voice echoing throughout the room, the high ceiling causing his voice to bounce around.

Before the Pixie party could respond, before Sylver could react to the odd distortion in the air behind him, and even before Spring realized what was happening, Sylver was on the floor and with a dagger pressed up against the back of his neck.

The person on top of Sylver seemed confused about the armor-like lattice on his back, but with a humiliating easiness twisted his dagger and forced his way through it.

“Wait! I know him!” A voice shouted and caused the man about to push the blade into Sylver’s spinal column to pause. Sylver felt a hand reach for his mask and released the bonds that held it glued to his face. Air whooshed out of it as the hollowed-out piece of wood was pulled away, and Sylver’s pale face became visible. He saw Edna nod at the edge of his vision.

“Sorry about that,” the man on top of Sylver said simply, his voice oddly muted, not quite monotone, but neither with a whole lot of emotion behind it.

The dagger, along with the pressure on his back, and the pressure around his hands that Sylver didn’t notice until it was released, went away in an instant as the man got off him.

Sylver’s robe pushed him up onto his feet from his completely prone position and absorbed the mask on the floor into itself.

“Are you with Erin’s group?” The man who had somehow managed to nearly kill Sylver asked.

Edna looked up and met his eye now and looked taken aback.

“I know, I know, white as snow, I’ll explain later, what is all this?” Sylver asked, waving away the obvious question Edna was struggling to put into words.

A mixture of being in total darkness for an extended period, as well as his constant use of magic effectively burning through every drop of whatever it was that gave people their color made Sylver’s skin almost glowing white. He hadn’t looked in the mirror for a long while, but he could imagine how his completely black eyes contrasted his colorless face.

“If you’re not with Erin? Who are you?” The man who had nearly killed Sylver asked. He was dressed in thin-looking cloth that Sylver could feel had some sort of enchantment underneath it. Most of it was a dark brown color, the kind used by those that snuck around during the night. The man was adorned with a mixture of strange-looking curved daggers, and small sharpened metal discs.

His hair was cut very close to his head, somewhat fine and with all the small campfires behind him, almost translucent. Going by the small squaring of his jaw and the flatness of his nose, Sylver guessed one of his grandparents was a dwarf, with the rest being human.

“Sylver Sezari, necromancer and adventurer extraordinaire,” Sylver answered, with a slight bow. The adrenaline rush was slowly receding, but it left a euphoria-like feeling in its place.

“Necromancer?” The man asked, looking sideways at Sabo, and the harpies perched on him as if he only now noticed them. Considering how dead silent they were, he really might have.

“They’re under my control, don’t worry about it. I’m going to guess you’re all part of the 50-person expedition that went missing?” Sylver asked, getting a strange stare from the man.

“I am. She’s not, and they’re not,” The man answered, gesturing at himself, then at Edna, and vaguely towards the left, where the majority of the least adventurer looking people sat.

“What are you doing in here? If you’re not part of Erin’s group, how did you get past the elves?” The man asked, crossing his arms and taking an ever so slight step back.

“Slipped past them. I came alone,” Sylver answered simply.

“Did you now…” The man said, his tone once again completely neutral, but Sylver could now see that his eyes appeared to glaze over slightly.

“He’s telling the truth,” Edna quickly said, to no effect given that the man seemed to ignore her. “He has a unique class, and he’s too rich to be bribed by the elves,” Edna continued.

Rich? How would she- right the money the cats paid me…

The man rubbed his hands together, metal mesh glove over metal mesh glove, and stared at Sylver.

“Sorry, where are my manners. Eliot ,rogue. Come. Have a seat while we talk,” Eliot offered, placing a hand on Sylver’s shoulder and leading him towards one of the tables in the back.

*

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Comparing notes had answered several questions.

The first was that Sylver was right. This was a challenge crypt.

Which was good news for Sylver, because according to Eliot the crypt counted the total level when deciding which creature to send them to fight.

Meaning a party with an average level of 100, would face enemies whose levels were 100, give or take. Usually give, since just about everyone who had made it here said that their enemies were at least 10 or so levels higher than them. Not counting the giant mass of proto zombies wandering in the corridors, those were all around level 50 to 60.

But the more interesting part was that almost everyone was forced to split up. The crypt blocked people from passing through the one-way barriers. Literally. In the areas where it split into left and right, different parties saw different paths being open.

Where the pixies could see a giant black wall blocking them from going left, the party right next to them saw a giant black wall blocking them from going right. How the crypt knew who was in a party and who wasn’t was a mystery to Sylver, and Eliot alike.

Eliot had put together the maps everyone had made on the way here and created what looked like a triangular funnel. Everyone started from the same spot, but then spread out, first into 2, then 4, then 8 then 16, and so on. Oddly enough, at some point, the funnel inverted, and started directing people to the same place. This place.

Sylver’s path matched almost perfectly with a party of mages who arrived here a few minutes prior, they were the reason everyone was so off guard. Because of the way everyone was spaced out, people arrived every couple of hours. If they arrived. The crypt seemed to be filtering people, moving the more ‘capable’ to the left, and the less capable to the right, but everyone had to pass through here eventually. Eliot’s theory was that it was based on time, how long it took a party to take down an enemy.

Sylver’s path mostly went to the left, taking a very hard right when he fought the harpies. Still, they all ended up here at the end, which kind of defeated the whole point of initially splitting them up.

“I always hated crypts with a gimmick,” Sylver said, almost to himself as he continued to stare at the strange map. It didn’t do a very good job when it came to showing the different levels, but Sylver was starting to think this was one of those awkward-shaped crypts. A slanted pyramid, or at least that’s what it looked like.

“You’ve been in a crypt before?” Eliot asked, mirroring Edna’s surprise.

“No, but I’ve researched them,” Sylver answered half honestly.

He normally had Rook or one of the queens handle these kinds of things. Or if Edmund wasn’t busy, just have him power his way through whatever intricate nonsense was going on inside. Sylver hadn’t been in an active, unconquered crypt in ages. Nyx took him with her once, but she did something to it, that destroyed all the traps and mechanical constructs waiting inside.

“Can you read the writing? The one on all the doors?” Enda asked, bringing Sylver out of his thoughts.

“What? No, it’s not a language I know. Speaking of which… Does anyone here have any of the items inside? There’s one specifically that I want, and I’m willing to pay a good price for it,” Sylver asked, as he looked around Eliot and his companions.

“What’s it called?” One of the women behind Eliot asked.

“[Dead Man’s Last Stand]” Sylver answered feeling an unpleasant reaction as he said it.

“How much would you have paid for it?” A man to her left asked.

‘Have paid’ past tense…

“Considering it’s a unique item, its value is entirely subjective. But my employer offered me 100 thousand gold for it,” Sylver lied.

The small group that had surrounded Sylver and Eliot stared at him wide-eyed.

Sylver took a very deep breath and closed his eyes. He didn’t like the way they were looking at him, and especially didn’t like hard how most of them were trying not to look at Eliot.

“I found it and used it,” Eliot said simply, deciding there was no point dragging this out.

A small, emotional, irrational, usually kept well under control and under wrap, part of Sylver, flicked his hand up and disintegrated Eliot into a pile of ashes.

Thankfully Sylver wasn’t insane, and instead just took another deep breath and opened his eyes with a newfound optimism.

“Fair enough. So why is everyone gathered here?” Sylver asked, switching the subject as fast as humanly possible.

“Initially there was just my group, there were, as you said 50 of us. When we arrived, there was a group of elves guarding the entrance. We forced our way through and made it inside. Inside we were all forcefully split up, lost some members, fell prey to a few of the cleverer traps, and found a small group of elves, who were hostile from the get-go, and we ended up getting attacked by them and barely won. One of the items they had on them was the [Dead Man’s Last Stand]. Before coming here, my party faced against a giant club-wielding creature, and I used it so we could kill it,” Eliot explained.

Fuck, he’s telling the truth…

“So… Am I to understand that the elves who were in here could somehow read and open the hidden rooms, but you killed them and took what they found for yourself?” Sylver asked. It wasn’t hard to keep the malice out of his voice. Because quite honestly, he didn’t have it in him to be concerned about some people getting killed.

They were already dead, there wasn’t any point starting something with this group over dead elves. Especially when Eliot alone had managed to overpower him. Even if Sylver had a strong feeling that he wouldn’t be able to do it again. Sylver’s appraisal showed him Eliot was level 88, but the discrepancy in speed and strength was too big, there was something else involved.

But Sylver’s gut was telling him, there was more than just a level difference. Eliot had done or used something extra, something Sylver’s gut was telling him couldn’t be used for a while. He could take him in a fight if it came down to it.

“Yes, in short. The group that followed after us was Enri’s, they didn’t go through any official channels, and were planning on coming in to offer their support services, but were surrounded by elves and forced to flee inside of the crypt. The last group to enter was Edna’s group, they fought their way inside through the elves guarding the entrance. We’re fairly certain that the next challenge will be against something at least 20 levels higher than the level average. All the people that thought they would be able to handle that, have already left,” Eliot explained, gesturing towards the wide-open doors leading further down the crypt.

Sylver couldn’t feel it from this far away but was certain there was a one-way barrier there.

“So, you’re all sitting here, waiting for…” Sylver asked.

“For someone to get to the end of the crypt. No one knew this was a challenge crypt, so now we either wait for someone to finish the crypt or try our luck facing against monsters 20 levels higher than us,” Eliot explained, as the small gathering around him nodded in a bored acceptance. They’d been here a while, Sylver noted.

Sylver knew there was something he wasn’t being told. Eliot wasn’t lying but he was hiding something.

“What happens when someone finishes the crypt?” Sylver asked, as he collected his notebook and hid it in his robe. He would give it to Spring later on, with fewer people watching.

“It shuts down. Any unclaimed treasure is destroyed, whatever monsters are left inside turn into ashes, rending all their materials useless, and hopefully everyone inside is teleported to the entrance,” Eliot explained.

“Hopefully?” Sylver repeated.

“Hopefully. We don’t even know who this crypt belongs to. If it weren’t for the elves trying to claim it, there would have been tests done to determine the danger level, the type, the owner, the risk, and the potential rewards. As it is, we went in blind and nearly got killed for it,” Eliot continued, waving with his hands as he spoke.

“Fair enough,” Sylver said simply.

*

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“So, what’s really going on?” Sylver whispered, as he sat down next to Edna and moved closer to warm up by the fire.

“It’s complicated,” Edna answered, staring at the flickering campfire.

“And here I was hoping it was something minor and simple,” Sylver retorted. He noticed from the corner of his eye that Edna had a scar down the side of her neck. Henra had one on the back of her hand, several actually. Only Essa was covered up enough that Sylver didn’t see any new scars. Other than that, they all looked well.

They sat in silence for a while, before Edna took a very deep breath and let her tense shoulders sag.

“You’ve heard about what’s going on in the west?” Edna said quietly.

“Silia declared war,” Sylver answered.

“How much do you know about it?” Edna asked.

“Nothing,” Sylver answered without so much as a hint of a joke.

Edna looked up from the fire and just stared at him.

“I have a hard time with politics, and whenever possible, I try to ignore them,” Sylver explained.

He heard a faint chuckle on his right, but Henra’s face was back to its usual stern shape by the time Sylver turned his head.

“So, you’re saying you just wandered in here, without any idea of why exactly everyone was scrapping together to get inside and didn’t think the elves guarding the entrance were any indication to turn back?” Edna asked, with strange neutrality in her tone. Sylver honestly couldn’t tell if there was any sarcasm mixed in, or if this was a genuine question.

“There was something I wanted inside. So, I went inside,” Sylver answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Edna leaned down and cupped her face in her hands.

“How are you so smart and so fucking stupid at the same time?” Edna asked, causing Henra to chuckle again. But she was still smiling when Sylver looked at her, as were Essa’s eyes.

“It’s a minor character flaw, I’m working on it. I’m overconfident but at the same time capable enough that it hasn’t been an issue so far. Careless, I guess if you had to put a word to it. No, not careless, I forgot the word for it in Eirish… Selfish? Not quite… Self-assured? Self-serving?” Sylver asked, trying to remember the word.

“Self-centred?” Essa suggested.

“…No… Maybe… Wait… Proud? Proud, that’s the word. I have too much pride to let something like walking into a dangerous crypt, or a few elves, stop me from getting what I want,” Sylver answered, still not fully certain proud was the word he was looking for.

Edna looked somewhere between horrified and about to burst into laughter.

“Well, at least you’re aware of it. You’ve heard about the current duke of Silia passing down his title soon, right?”

“Yes, lady Camilla, there’s a tournament for becoming her bodyguard at her coronation,” Sylver answered, well aware of this given that he’d been asked twice to compete in said competition.

“Did you know she has a certain amount of precognition? Nothing as powerful as the high king, but it would be wrong to compare her to the average clairvoyant,” Edna asked.

“I didn’t know that,” Sylver answered. Ron might have mentioned it, but it was hard to remember properly.

“Well, she thinks, and she is very rarely wrong when she makes big declarations like this, but lady Camilla thinks there’s a [Hero]s weapon at the end of this crypt. Some even speculate that this crypt belongs to a [Hero],” Edna said in a tense whisper.

Fuck you, Poppy.

“And the part Eliot didn’t want to tell me?”

“Right, you can sense that kind of stuff… There’s kind of, sort of, very likely, a bunch of pissed-off elves waiting in ambush in the next room. One of Eliot’s party members has this skill called [Danger Sense], it gives him a sense of danger, don’t laugh, and he checked while having a priest in his party, and while not having one, and concluded that whatever is waiting in the next area isn’t undead or made of darkness. Meaning it is very likely the elves Eliot attacked but couldn’t kill,” Edna finished.

Sylver thought about it for a few minutes and stood up slowly.

“So, Eliot is stopping any elf reinforcements from passing through here, and the elves ahead are stopping everyone else from passing through them. Meaning this is a stalemate, and we could be here for months. Hoping that the elves guarding the entrance are killed by reinforcements from Eliot’s faction, as opposed to elven reinforcements, that will kill their way through Eliot if they arrive first,” Sylver concluded.

“Pretty much,” Edna confirmed.

“You’re wrong,” Sylver said, gesturing towards Sabo and the harpies, waiting patiently in the distant corner.

“I’m wrong?” Edna asked.

“You said it’s complicated. It’s not, it’s very simple. We just need to push our way through the crypt and finish it,” Sylver said.

“We?” Henra and Edna said in sync.

“You’re all in the 60s area, right?” Sylver asked.

Edna whispered 61 for herself, 63 for Essa, and 69 for Henra.

“What do you mean ‘we’,” Henra repeated.

“I mean, I like you three, and I would like your help in clearing this crypt. We split things evenly, but if we find something similar to the [Dead Man’s Last Stand] I get to keep it, I’m willing to pay you for it, if you feel it’s unfair. Also, I guess this should be obvious, but with me being a necromancer, and all our opponents being undead, I’m going to need to be in command,” Sylver explained, looking around at the three women.

“No,” Henra said, barely a breath after Sylver had finished speaking.

“No?” Sylver asked, looking around but seeing both Edna and Essa look down.

“No. Too much of a risk, we barely managed to defeat a monster 10 levels higher than us, going up against elves that give even Eliotpause isn’t something we’re capable of,” Henra explained.

Sylver thought about it quietly for a moment or two and could see something was being left unsaid. Sylver guessed that they didn’t listen to Henra before, and it didn’t go well. And now had no choice but to admit she knew what she was doing, even if they didn’t like it.

“I am going to sleep for a while, and leave after that. If you change your mind, let me know,” Sylver said. He didn’t doubt that Edna had kept what they were up to herself, but didn’t feel like it would be enough to change Henra’s mind. Something had happened, Sylver could feel it, even if he couldn’t figure out what it was exactly.

But they were grown women, they made their own choices and decisions, and Sylver couldn’t force them into going along with him. Plus, what he was planning with the elves would work slightly better if he was alone.