“Why did they stop moving?” Ria asked.

“Maybe they realized that if they keep attacking me, I might run away, so they’re doing this to trick me into staying here. Competent units might be mere seconds away,” Sylver said, as he adjusted his jaw until it stopped clicking when he spoke.

In the background, the shades continued lifting and carrying the motionless Krists over to Sylver.

Sylver flinched as a bolt of lightning descended from the sky, and silently disappeared into the mushroom funnel.

“26,” Sylver whispered to himself.

“You said not to count them?” Ria asked.

“26 lightning bolts. And these aren’t your usual background noise lightning bolts, these are the type that leave massive craters filled with boiling rock!” Sylver mumbled towards Edmund’s coffin.

By this point in time, the wind was so powerful that Sylver should have been sent flying away, just about every tree near him had been uprooted and sucked into the air.

Thankfully, he had magic at his disposal, as did Mora. The mushroom platform was quite literally rooted into the ground and was then further aided by Sylver’s magic.

Sylver waited for the 27th bolt of lightning to strike before he walked over to Edmund’s coffin and opened it.

As he gently lifted the lid he felt a familiar mixture of numbness, heat, and prickling on his face. Inside the coffin, a nude boy was laying in a large pile of ashes. His skin was pitch black, with glowing cracks spread out all over his body, as if he was a hollow wooden puppet, burning from the inside.

Very slowly, Sylver reached out with his hand and wiped the ash off Edmund’s forehead.

“Why does he look like a child?” Ria asked, as Sylver ever so gently brushed more of the ash away and revealed more glowing cracks on Edmund’s nose and cheeks.

There was a smile on Sylver’s face, but his eyes were wide in horror.

“It’s his bloodline magic. The healing process makes him age backward… But if he was an old man when he died, just how much healing did he need to get this young?” Sylver asked as he leaned forward slightly, to see the shape of the crack on Edmund’s other cheek.

To most people, the various cracks appeared to be nothing more than random tears in Edmund’s skin, and for the most part, they were right. The pattern was never the same, but because Sylver had been around Edmund for as long as he had, he had learned to match the style of the cracks, with the magic Edmund was casting.

Sylver reached out towards Ria, and she yelped in surprise as he grabbed her. While Mora prepared to take off, Sylver kicked the coffin’s lid shut with his foot, and using [Fog Form] materialized directly on Mora’s back.

With the strength of an enchanted crossbow, Mora was flung high into the sky, directly towards the middle of the storm, which had been slowly inching towards Edmund’s mushroom platform.

The wind was largely ignored, as was the lightning bolt that tried to hit her, as Mora rose higher and higher into the sky, and in a matter of seconds, broke through the dark storm clouds, and was blinded by the unbearably intense sunlight.

Thankfully, she knew what Sylver knew, pushed past her discomfort, and continued going higher and higher. With each second there was less and less air for her to control, and use as a steppingstone, as Sylver channeled every drop of his mana into her and hoped his ribcage was as indestructible as the description suggested.

He felt a sort of shiver in the nearby primal energy touching his primal energy field and quickly moved Ria so her folded-up staff was pressed up against his chest, while Mora maneuvered herself so her “core” was directly in front of Sylver’s small inner ribcage.

Ria said something, but Sylver was too preoccupied with making sure his ribcage was angled to create as much blocking area as possible to hear her.

The storm clouds blocked out the initial flash of light, but even with what little air there was this high up, Sylver still heard the unique crackle Edmund was famous for.

He flexed his abdominal muscles and shattered two outer ribs. Instantly Sylver was surrounded by an assortment of camping equipment, but more importantly, he had a large block of water, and a similarly large block of [Necrotic Mutilation] liquid flowing to his exposed back.

Sylver used what little mana he had left to move the liquid armor into place, but it was burned away before it even started to solidify.

He clutched at Ria, and Mora, who was hiding inside her larger body, and even as his shoulders became detached from what remained of his torso, he forced his hands to remain as they were.

Few languages have the proper vocabulary to accurately describe the sheer scale and terror of being surrounded by invisible heat. Sylver’s heads didn’t even have time to melt, they skipped that step and quite simply turned into a gas, that was just as quickly blown out of Sylver’s reach.

Sylver’s bones were next, even if in reality the process was so quick, it might as well have been instantaneous. There was no shattering, cracking, they didn’t even really break. They were there one moment, and then they were not. What belongings Sylver carried inside his bones were summoned out of them but disappeared before Sylver so much as registered their presence.

His daggers, coins, books, journals, the wooden chests he made, various pans, bowls, forks, spoons, spare ink, pencils, sharpening stones, everything that hadn’t been deemed irreplaceable made the lightning-fast transition from existing to not.

***

Only a single solid piece of Sylver remained, a congealed mess of flesh wrapped around a single bone hidden deep inside Sylver’s indestructible chest, loosely attached to a bundle of charred skin tissue flapping in front of Sylver’s ribcage.

It took him a couple of seconds to come to his senses, but Sylver was relieved to see that there was a scorched black golden sphere pressed up against him. On instinct more than any plan, the sphere contained not just Mora, but the entirety of Sylver’s shadowy army.

Sylver felt the system hesitate as he summoned his very recently acquired [Mage Cap], and almost reluctantly, a crown of bright red grew out of Sylver’s shiny black ribcage and peaked out through the chainmail-covered ribs.

As he regained control over what was left of his body, he was surprised to find there was more of him left than he had expected. His right hand was almost in one piece, it was only missing 3 fingers: the pinkie, ring, and middle, and the carpal bones had fused with his metacarpal, but it was significantly better than nothing.

Compared to the mana-enhanced thermal radiation, the wave of superheated air was almost a joke. Sylver destroyed every single shade, except Spring, and used the influx of mana [Dying Breath] provided to force the hot gas to flow past him.

As Sylver’s [Gnarled Staff Fragment Of Igri] appeared on his thumb, he mentally sighed with relief, as liquid darkness oozed out of his metallic ribcage, and formed the rough shape of his body. Sylver solidified the darkness into a physical form, and only now started to scan his surroundings.

For starters, the storm was gone.

As a matter of fact, the sky was so clear it looked almost as if it had been drawn by a lazy child. It was akin to being in the middle of a perfectly calm sea, nothing but blue as far as the eye could see.

As Sylver lowered the gaze [Lesser Perception] provided, he saw a mirror image below him.

Clear blue sky, as far as the eye could see.

It was a sight very few people had the displeasure of seeing.

An expanse of perfectly flat glass tended to fuck with people’s heads, the human mind didn’t like seeing seemingly man-made structures of such an enormous size.

Bright blue sky above, reflective shiny mirror below.

Sylver felt gravity take its hold on him and realized that his [Bracelet of The Aurai] had been burned away along with the rest of his belongings, including his [Staff Of Infernal Interference].

He felt a pang of guilt over the realization, but it was brief, in the grand scheme of things, the umbrella wasn’t important.

For a few seconds, Sylver simply allowed gravity to peacefully pull him down towards the blindingly bright mirror ground.

“What just happened?” Ria asked quietly.

Her voice was so utterly devoid of any kind of emotion that it took Sylver several seconds to recognize that the sounds she had made were words spoken to him.

“Ed glassed a couple kilometers worth of land,” Sylver answered just as calmly.

Although, his calm wasn’t the same as Ria’s “calm.” You wouldn’t call a shell-shocked person “calm,” even if they sounded relaxed and reasonable.

“How?” Ria asked.

“Does the word “entropy” mean anything to you? I feel like that’s one of the words we borrowed from Earth,” Sylver asked.

“Entropy is a measurable physical property that is most commonly associated as a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty,” Ria answered, and Sylver’s shadowy head nodded.

He looked down at her and saw the barest outline of a face on her liquid metal sphere of gold.

“Edmund’s bloodline magic allows him to absorb heat and convert it into mana. Most of his family was content with that, but because Ed is Ed, he figured out a way to expand his bloodline magic’s definition of “heat.” The end result is that he can absorb multiple forms of energy, and as you just saw, release them,” Sylver explained, as Mora poked her head out of Ria’s sphere.

She was about the size of an apple, a 7-legged pearl white arachnid, with a round abdomen, and a coin-sized head.

“So, he can manipulate entropy?” Ria asked.

“It isn’t as straightforward as I make it sound, or as convenient, but basically yes,” Sylver answered.

In the same way a single speck of dust can be obvious on a well-polished mirror, so was the coffin Edmund had been carried in.

As was the pale-skinned boy standing next to it, gazing up at the sky.

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

Can’t have a face if you don’t even have a head.

[Piss Off – Eat Shit + Cunt – 261]

[HP: ??? – ???%]

[MP: ??? – ???%]

[Stamina: ??? – ???%]

[Corpse – Unique]

[Soul – Unique]

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been used!]

Sylver was surprised to feel a shiver pass through his body, mostly because the piece of him that was left didn’t have anything even remotely close to nerve endings. Luckily for him, the system wasn’t interested in what Sylver didn’t have and provided him with the impossible feeling anyway.

As they continued to fall, Ria transformed back into a 3-pronged staff, and at Sylver’s suggestion, Mora jumped onto her. About 100 feet off the ground, Ria stopped falling, and hovered, while Sylver continued to fall downward.

He landed on the clear, mirror-smooth glass with a faint clink, as his shadowy feet absorbed what little impact Sylver’s 5 or so kilograms of mass had accumulated from falling.

In front of him, stood a shirtless boy, with trousers made out of what looked like finely ground coal.

Sylver and the young man stood where they were and simply stared into each other’s eyes.

It was dead silent, what little wind there was couldn’t find anything to brush against to make a sound, the sun was searing Sylver’s shadowy body, and even without a nose, Sylver could smell the unmistakable scent of ozone.

“You look good…” the young boy said, with such a familiar cadence that it caused the tiny part of Sylver that was still “alive” to develop tear ducts, and then immediately put them to use.

The ancient lich tried to respond with something, but every time he tried the words got caught in his metaphorical throat.

The two continued to silently stare at each other.

They both discovered that they didn’t know what to say.

Since the moment they became friends, they had never really been separated. They had never bothered with hellos or goodbyes, and now Sylver didn’t want to greet the man, because that would be admitting that they had been separated.

As usual, Ed was the first to start walking, and a half moment later, Sylver began to walk towards him too.

Both ancient beings tried not to cry as they approached each other, and both failed as their relieved nervous laughter gradually shifted into an almost childlike weeping, as the two embraced one another in a hug.