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Ch233-Two Of A Kind

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Everything was going so right.

The mushroom lightning rod was working somehow, Sylver's hearts were pumping with adrenaline, and he had more skulls to crack open than he knew what to do with.

As Sylver released his hold on his ax and watched as it flew 2 meters forwards and embedded itself into the man with teeth growing out of his chin as if it were a beard, he allowed himself a soft chuckle, as the ax materialized in his hand, and was promptly used to chop off a fingerless hand.

He could see why people struggled against these things.

Their danger was in their quantity because there sure as shit wasn’t any quality to speak off.

Just about every single one of them was built as if being symmetrical was a sin.

The only consistent thing was that they didn’t have any exposed bone, which, if you’ve ever studied flesh crafting, is a lot harder than simply growing a bunch of abominations. It meant that their shapes were the way they were on purpose, or whatever was making them was following a very strict theme.

Which meant that there was a possibility that the Krists were a creation of a deity, or possibly even a minor god.

[??? (Warrior) Defeated!]

21…

Sylver had killed at least 400 Krists, and only 21 had a high enough level for the system to even acknowledge their death.

The thing is though, as someone who had been living with the system for over a year, Sylver had gotten the hang of estimating what a creature’s, or monster’s, rough level is.

The average level felt to be over 100, excluding the very small ones, the ones that didn’t have a torso and were just a head and arms. But the rest, they hit hard, even if they were slow.

Even with that though, this “army” was pretty pathetic.

If Sylver hadn’t gotten his jaw blown off, there was a chance he might have underestimated them. The only reason he hadn’t just left everything to Spring and Mora, was that something didn’t feel right and because Sylver decided it would be a good idea to blow off a little bit of steam before Edmund woke up.

He broke open 9 more body parts that were probably skulls.

[??? (Warrior) Defeated!]

A good quarter of the shades were being used to scout, to find where exactly these abominations were coming from. But try as they might, there simply wasn’t a single place or direction from which these fleshy beasts were crawling out of.

One theory was that these things were a hivemind, and up until Sylver showed up, they were just standing around, waiting for someone to accidentally teleport into their midst.

The problem with that theory was that Sylver had fought many hive minds, and this “army” wasn’t fighting like a hivemind, not even close. Hiveminds that were seconds old, so basic and primitive that they could barely get their hosts to walk, had a better grasp on army tactics.

Unless it was purposely trying to lull Sylver into a false sense of security. Which, while clever, and something Sylver often did, wasn’t going to work on him, because that was something Sylver often did.

Then again, if Sylver was trying to attack him, he wouldn’t have thrown that metal ball to start everything. So far Sylver counted at most 10 creatures capable of a ranged attack, so what was the point of trying to hurt him before they got close enough to do anything?

Then there are the “weapons” they used. Rusty cleavers, sickles, hammers, frying pans, makeshift axes made by shoving a kitchen knife longways into a club, chains, pitchforks, meat hooks, a fucking brick, and Sylver’s personal favorite, a spear without a spear tip. Which was basically a long stick.

He was pretty sure he even saw a walking stick or one of the shades did at least.

This sort of thing didn’t make sense if Sylver was fighting a hivemind.

Unless this was a hivemind that was playing the long game, and the only purpose of this attack was so Sylver would mistakenly assume it wasn’t a hivemind.

The fight went on uninterrupted for over half an hour.

Sylver and Mora stayed relatively close to Edmund’s coffin, and as a result, there wasn’t any ground to walk on, just about every inch of visible dirt was covered in either a corpse or a piece of a corpse. From a bird’s eye view, there was a bloody circle around the platform being repeatedly struck by lightning.

He’d lost count, or more honestly, Sylver was doing his best not to count, so he couldn’t say with certainty that it would take years worth of molten-rock level heat to wake Ed up.

Lola had her mana well, and while it wouldn’t be too difficult to connect it to some sort of makeshift forge, the amount of mana that could be sustainably taken from it was basically insignificant if over 20 lightning strikes didn’t do anything.

As Sylver expertly spun out of the way of a thrown chain, he shoved his hand into what was hopefully an empty eye socket, and with a flick of his finger tore the creature’s brainstem into pieces.

Sylver flinched as the 23rd bolt of lightning tried to strike him but ended up being redirected towards Edmund.

The thing that confused Sylver about whoever was behind these Krists, was that he couldn’t understand what the point of this was.

They were just wasting resources.

Meat doesn’t exactly grow on trees, and even if the creatures Sylver was currently fighting were “expendable,” why waste them on an impossible-to-win attack, when they could be fed to something bigger and stronger?

During the half-hour “battle,” Sylver made an effort to figure out how these things were being motivated, and the best explanation he had was that they were aggressive to everything that wasn’t one of their own.

Suicidally aggressive mind you.

Sylver would have understood it if he had somehow landed on an important piece of land or something, but the area was empty when he had arrived, the Krists came here because of him.

A potential answer was that they were stalling, but for half an hour? Even if Sylver simply ran away on foot, not a single one of these things would have a chance to catch him.

The only thing that made sense to him was that the leader of these things had been killed during the first 5 seconds of the fight, and the remaining flesh golems simply following their leader’s final order.

But even if he assumed that was the case, why were more Krists coming towards him?

Was this just their natural reaction to someone trespassing on their conquered area?

[??? (Warrior) Defeated!]

With [Dead Dominion], and the freedom [Mage Cap] provided, Sylver was pretty much flying.

When he pushed against something heavier than him, his body was pushed instead, which meant that if he picked 3 corpses to push against simultaneously, and was above them, he could effectively float, and fly.

The only way this “battle” could get better is if Sylver had been able to convert at least some of the fallen Krists into zombies.

Despite appearances, their biology was dissimilar enough to what Sylver was familiar with, that his magic wasn’t capable of taking hold of their bodies. That was part of it, the other part was that Sylver could feel their corpses resisting his magic.

If he sat down and forced one of them into unlife, Sylver was certain he’d be able to create a Krist zombie. But it was too much effort and mana, for a creature that was weaker than the shades.

Sylver felt an unpleasant itching crawl up his outer spine, and the next thing he knew, two creatures were standing on top of Edmund’s coffin, looking down at it.

One had a skull of some sort of wild dog, the teeth were wrong for a wolf, while the other had the skull of a large horse.

Their backs were turned away from Sylver, if he didn’t know any better, he would have thought they were inspecting his lightning redirecting framework.

Sylver pushed as hard as he could through [Dead Dominion] and propelled himself towards the two men. He didn’t doubt that Edmund’s coffin was impenetrable, and couldn’t be moved from where Sylver put it, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a chance he was wrong.

As he pushed himself harder, he felt the mana channels in his legs protest the volume being transferred through them.

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been successfully blocked!]

The two skull-wearing sorcerers looked away from the coffin a split second before Sylver reached them, and before Sylver so much as reached for his umbrella, they teleported away. Because of his speed, he missed the coffin and wasted even more mana to slow himself down.

He ignored the battle going on around him, as he ran his hand all around the framework, and sent over 10 pulses of mana through the whole platform to check if something had been added, or removed, to his framework.

Sylver was blinded as lightning descended right next to him.

The flash was brief, and if Sylver hadn’t seen it disappear into the metallic coffin, he wouldn’t have known that it had struck true. He touched what should have been white hot metal with the back of his hand, but it wasn’t even warm.

When he was confident the framework and Edmund were fine, he lifted his head and looked around.

The Krists weren’t fighting Sylver’s shades, they weren’t running towards him, they weren’t running away, they just stood there…

Drooling, twitching, bleeding out, but aside from that, they were standing perfectly still.

Too anxious to get that far away from Ed’s coffin again, Sylver remained where he was, and another 3 bolts of lightning struck the mushroom funnel.

“They stopped moving,” Ria said out loud.

“I can see that,” Sylver said, as the last shade that had been fighting a moment earlier slithered back into his shadow. The scouts were still out there, but every single Krist creature that they could find was standing still.

Sylver straightened out his robe and took his jaw out of his [Bound Bones] storage. He lifted his mask, as he brought his jaw up to his face, and manipulated a floating string to stitch as many of the muscles together.

While he did that, a team of shades carried several Krists over, that Sylver promptly sucked dry using [Draining Blight].

The bone in his jaw healed into one piece, the various bruises littered throughout his body lost their color and finally disappeared, and although there wasn’t anywhere near enough HP to heal everything, there was more than enough for Sylver to completely fix his face and fix most of his fingers.

[Undead Mastery(VI) Proficiency increased to 92%!]

[Mirage(IV) Proficiency increased to 88%!]

[Draining Blight(VI) Proficiency increased to 90%!]

[Necrotic Mutilation(IV) Proficiency increased to 96%!]

[Mutating Override(II) Proficiency increased to 99%!]

[Vigorous Conditioning(V) Proficiency increased to 72%!]

“Huh… apparently, the fight is over…” Sylver said partially to himself, partially to Ria, and just a bit to Edmund.