Should I chase after them for a day or so, before asking the ancient dragon to help me?

Would I even be able to explain what I need help with?

And then what? How could it help me?

Could it teleport me directly to them?

Will it help me?

What if it decided that I’m incompetent, or thought I was working against it?

Thankfully, Sylver realized he was inside a dungeon that contained a hat that belonged to the person who imprisoned the aforementioned dragon. This felt like it could lead to a life-threatening misunderstanding.

He was very gentle as he folded up the mana-soaked piece of paper and put it back into his robe.

“What do you think are the chances that they will get stuck in one of those 12 door testing rooms? With an enemy, they aren’t able to defeat with a single swipe of the sword?” Sylver asked, as Ulvic jumped over one trap, and then another.

Most had already been tripped, and given the lack of corpse, were ineffective, but there were a couple that had waited for Ulvic’s foot to activate it. As Sylver looked through his available perks, and out of habit looked through his status, he found a solution for his problem.

Mora was already halfway to sticking herself onto his back when he summoned a dagger into his hand and carefully moved his internal organs around.

“What are you doing?” Ria asked, as Sylver’s robe started to wrap itself around her, and gradually shrunk until it was almost thin enough to be described as skintight.

“I am going to hope we’re close enough to them for me to cover the distance in under 100 seconds,” Sylver explained, as he held his dagger with one hand, and used his other hand to line the tip up properly.

Ideally, Sylver would have remembered he possessed this perk and used it the moment they started to run, but there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about his past mistakes.

[Perk: Hare’s Great Escape]

-While in contact with the needle and below 20% health, dexterity increases by 500% for 100 seconds.

*Can only be used once every 24 hours.

Sylver took a metaphorical deep breath, as he glued his eyes onto his HP, and slowly stabbed himself through his first heart.

According to the system, stabbing his first heart was worth 450 HP, whereas cutting his head clean into two did a little under 50 HP worth of damage. Sylver twisted the dagger and made the hole he had created a huge pain in the ass to fix but was thankfully provided with an extra 200 HP worth of damage.

It didn’t hurt, he didn’t feel “woozy” from his blood pressure dropping slightly, but the gaping hole in his chest immediately started to feel itchy. Sylver pressed on, and slowly pierced his lung equivalent, and while it did feel like being strangled, it was only worth 250 HP.

Sylver stabbed himself through the eye, slit his throat, and even forced a liter of blood to leak out, but the system simply refused to drop his HP below 20%. It was as if it was mocking him for wearing a flesh suit over his “real” body.

It also seemed to calculate the damage based on how annoying it would be for Sylver to fix.

Sylver moved his hand to his back and slid the dagger between his vertebrae. His legs spasmed for a second as he became paralyzed from the waist down, but more importantly, that bit of damage pushed him right over the edge of 400 HP.

The amount of strength Sylver’s legs could give out remained the same, but the amount of force he could exert per second increased 5 fold.

Sylver’s old body, before his transformation, wouldn’t have been capable of this. The bones in his legs would have shattered, along with his knees, and possibly his hip.

But his new body merely destroyed Sylver’s enchanted boots, from the sheer pressure the soles of his feet exerted onto the leather material.

Sylver hit the ground running, and after about 10 steps, realized running on all 4 would be the better option. It was fortunate that his spine was currently in 2 parts because it provided him with the proper flexibility to bend his back like a cat as he ran.

He pushed himself forward with his legs and simultaneously pulled himself forward with his hands. It was significantly easier said than done, but Sylver got the hang of it quickly enough.

Mora helped him by reducing the air resistance, as Sylver sprinted through a slowed-down world. The darts flying from the ceiling, which had previously been nothing but dark blurs, now flew slowly enough that Sylver was certain he could catch them.

After roughly 20 steps, or leaps, or whichever word a person would use to describe a necromancer running on all 4s like a wild animal, Sylver realized his mind was faster than his body, just enough that his movements felt sluggish. Sadly, he was too preoccupied with keeping proper form and enhancing his limbs, to provide himself any further magical assistance.

Ria kept count for him, by the time he was close enough to the running cultivators that he could sense the sweat dripping off their backs, he had 18 seconds left.

He had 11 seconds left as he turned the corner and could see all 3 men running just a bit slower than him right now.

Sylver didn’t waste a fraction of a second as he leaped towards the blue robe heir, and channeled every drop of mana into his arm, as he prepared to slice the boy’s body into two.

He ignored the sharp pain on his hand, as Ki washed over him, and focused everything on killing the boy.

Sylver had 5 seconds left, as he saw orange robe stop running and turn around on his heel. The orange bathrobe wearing cultivator grasped the hilt of his sword, and even with his enhanced speed Sylver still couldn’t properly see the man’s movements.

He knew exactly what the swordsman was about to do, as Sylver released the spell out of his palm and fingers and hated the fact that he needed literally another quarter of a second to “win.”

To Sylver’s eyes, the blurry man awkwardly crab-walked forward and gently waved his sword up and down as if he was trying to shake off paint from the tip of his long brush.

But he wasn’t painting a picture, he was slicing Sylver’s extended arm into flat patties, and was gradually moving up his wrist, forearm, elbow, bicep, shoulder, and then Sylver’s head.

Having realized that getting blue robe right now just plain and simple wasn’t on the table, Sylver used what little mana he had available to fling his entire cut-up hand slices at the blurry man’s face. He was about 50% certain he was looking at an afterimage, but he got lucky and managed to use his own bone fragments to scratch the man’s eyes.

Sylver didn’t have enough mana to properly gouge them, but he did succeed in forcing the man to break his stance for a fraction of a second.

Sadly, the now blind man’s focus returned, as he continued gently waving his sword up and down Sylver’s head, and with every blurry swing of the blade, sliced through Sylver’s forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, neck, shoulders, and finally, his sword shattered as it collided with the top of Sylver’s unbreakable ribcage.

The small head inside Sylver’s chest, the one that continued Sylver’s “real” brain, had been purposely squashed down into the ribcage it was attached to, the way a turtle might retreat into its protective shell. But because Sylver’s ribs had a limited amount of space, the top part of his skull was in the open.

Sylver didn’t see what had happened, but the moment [Hare’s Great Escape] ran out, he was flung towards the wall and landed into a pile of his own flesh and bone discs. He didn’t even get a moment to catch his breath, as orange robe tried to stab Sylver through the chest with what remained of his sword.

He felt Ria work in tandem with Mora to deflect the blade, but neither of them had the physical strength to stop cultivator’s attack. Sylver summoned 2 bombs right in front of his chest and detonated them.

Since his back was already against the wall, and Sylver had thankfully managed to get the angle right, he mostly remained where he was. The shockwave from the explosion shredded the front of his robe and ripped apart every inch of skin on his chest, stomach, and thighs, and it was only now that Sylver discovered that his legs had also been sliced to pieces.

Sylver’s pain was blocked by the fact that he was undead, and what little managed to slip through was drowned out by unadulterated rage.

A part of him had to admit, orange did good, and while Sylver couldn’t help but respect his suicidal attack, he simultaneously knew just how much effort fixing his body would take, and lost all sympathy for the bastard.

To his credit, orange robe didn’t try to finish Sylver off this time, and since the explosion had almost breached his Ki armor, he had mere seconds of life left.

“IT’S HIS CHEST!” the man screamed, so loudly that the volume threatened to burst Sylver’s eardrums.

As the man took a breath to scream again, an invisible floating razor wrapped around his neck. It immediately sawed through his brittle Ki armor and sent bright blue sparks flying everywhere, as Mora’s magic interfered with what remained of the man’s Ki.

Sylver hadn’t realized he had been holding his breath, until he saw the man’s head fall to the ground, a moment before his orange bathrobe wearing body did.

[Human (Fangs Of The Blue Tiger) Defeated!]

[Due to defeating an enemy 110 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

[Swamp Lord] has reached level 58!

+5AP

[Necrotic Mutilation (IV) Proficiency increased to 62%!]

[Vigorous Conditioning (III) Proficiency increased to 100%!]

[Vigorous Conditioning (III) rank up available!]

Even though there wasn’t a second to spare, Sylver was plain and simple too angry, and disappointed, to properly concentrate on pulling himself back together. His paper-thin meat circle slid toward him, and like slugs climbing up a desecrated corpse, slithered into a pile that formed his chest, neck, head, and finally created a limb that could roughly be described as an arm.

Sylver had to mix his [Necrotic Mutilation] armor and his shadow into the limb to hold it together. Thankfully his legs had only been cut in 4 places, and Mora had already brought them to him by the time he was done aligning one of the mana channels in his hand.

Sylver forced his legs to heal first as he got up from the floor and walked over to the corpse that had all but killed him.

There wasn’t so much as a droplet of Ki inside the man’s body. Sylver absorbed him into his [Bound Bones] storage with the same ease he absorbed corpses of magical creatures.

Under different circumstances, Sylver would have taken the time to sit down, to lick his wounds, but even as he shuffled the discs that made up his arm to get them in the right order, Ulvic was already forming underneath him to hopefully catch up with the two remaining cultivators.

He was barely in one piece, he struggled to form a fist with his left hand, he was in severe pain that he was ignoring, but aside from that, Sylver was almost done.