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Ch125-Two Wrongs

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“I don’t suppose you all have had a chance to speak to my copy and came to the conclusion that none of you can beat me, let alone kill me?” Sylver asked as he walked backward, step by step until his back was pressed up against the wall that wasn’t there a moment ago.

“You’re outmatched and outnumbered kid,” the Bigs standing between 2 other Bigs’ said.

“So you can talk, fantastic. Who am I speaking to? Are you the one controlling all these parasites, or are you just a copy of the real Bigs who has been forced into fighting me?” Sylver asked, as the copies slowly spread out and surrounded him.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Runnel asked in a slightly worried voice. Although he sounded far more frightened than worried.

The voice and speech pattern was perfect. If Sylver didn’t know these weren’t the originals, and he didn’t see 2 more of each one, and they didn’t have slimy worms hanging out of the corner of their mouths, Sylver would have the real Bigs, Estus and Runnel had simply turned on him.

“Listen… We can come to an agreement. What do you want? I’ve got magic the likes of which you can’t imagine, I can do anything. You want more mana? I can show you how to get mana from the surface that you’ll be able to use. Or if you want-”

Sylver raised his right hand that was holding a dagger above his head and a little behind him.

The fake Sylver that dropped from the ceiling made a weird half gasp sound as his dagger was flicked out of his hand by Sylver’s robe, and the dagger the real Sylver was holding cut into his belly and sliced up towards his torso. The fake Sylver tried to grab at the real Sylver as he fell, but Sylver’s robe simply became too fluid to grab onto and shoved him away so he wouldn’t fall onto the real Sylver.

The fake landed on the floor with his inside spilling out of him and made a gasping noise similar to that of a fish on land.

“Well you don’t have my intelligence, that’s for sure. And by the looks of things, you don’t have any magic either,” the real Sylver said as he kicked the disemboweled copy over onto his back, and stomped onto his chest with his right foot. Sylver waved his hand towards the body on the floor, and a dagger slashed its throat open.

[??? (Mage+Mage) Defeated!]

“So you only copied my physical, nonmagical attributes. What about my memories and consciousness? How does that work?” Sylver asked the copy standing several feet away from him, which turned even paler than Sylver normally was.

Sylver stepped over his corpse and saw all 10 copies take a step back from him.

“What’s this now? Afraid of little old me? Talking is still very much on the table,” Sylver offered.

For a moment Sylver thought they were really going to go for it.

“Alright… I’ll try again with the next batch,” Sylver said, as he took another step towards the copies, as felt something wrap around his right wrist. He smiled a little as he turned his hand over and wrapped the wire even tighter around his arm.

Sylver very gently grasped the thin as a blade wire and sent a pulse of lightning through it.

The Bigs standing on the very left made a sound and then fell to the ground while shaking uncontrollably.

“You might want to-”

[Samelf (Warrior+Rogue+Mystic+Bleeder) Defeated!]

[Due to defeating an enemy 20 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

“Never mind,” Sylver said, as he yanked as hard as he could at the strings wrapped around his hand, and caused the very recently deceased Bigs to get launched high into the air.

“In my experience string users are either extremely dangerous and overpowered, or weak to the point that it’s kind of funny,” Sylver explained, as he yanked his hand one more time and caused the corpse to change direction and fly towards him instead.

Sylver moved his hand as if he was going to yank it one more time, but instead, the string just passed through his arm and disappeared as it was pulled back into Bigs’s mechanism.

Sylver’s body lost shape for a second or two, as multiple razor-sharp strings passed through him and scratched the floor and wall behind him as a result. Sylver stopped using [Shadow’s Soma] and pulled his hand back, and threw his dagger at Estus.

Estus dodged out of the way, but the bright red dagger changed direction and instead stabbed one of the Runnels in the ear, and entered his head up to the hilt.

[Samelf (Mage+Mage+Warlock+Ice Burner) Defeated!]

[Due to defeating an enemy 10 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

The Bigs Sylver had killed using lightning landed at his feet, while the remaining 8 copies turned and ran away from Sylver and towards the other side of the room. Sylver picked the corpse up by the back of the head and blew a small amount of yellow-tinted black smoke out of his mouth and into the worm-filled mouth of the dead Bigs.

[Zombie (Petty) Raised!]

“Let me see… somethings like… this?” Sylver guessed as the small man in his hand began to wildly flail his arms around. Small sparks appeared all over the room, and gradually moved away from Sylver and the Bigs in his hand, and towards the running group of 8. The wires were all over the place, but Sylver didn’t need to be precise.

The two remaining Bigs’ turned around immediately and started to move their arms around and towards Sylver, and Sylver just barely managed to keep his grip on the Bigs in his hand.

Everyone who had been trying to run away either tripped and fell or were pulling against an invisible force.

“Tangled up?” Sylver asked, as he reached over the struggling body in his hand and grabbed both sets of wires. They sparkled with yellow light for a second or two.

[Samelf (Warrior+Rogue+Mystic+Bleeder) Defeated!]

[Due to defeating an enemy 20 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

[Samelf (Warrior+Rogue+Mystic+Bleeder) Defeated!]

[Due to defeating an enemy 20 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

Sylver let go of the zombie he was holding in the air, and it landed on its feet and carried on flailing its hands around, while the remaining 6 copies attempted to get out of the barely visible wires that had entangled them.

Sylver walked through the fast-moving wires, with every single one passing right through him as he almost casually walked towards the struggling men.

“So you can copy the physical bodies, and the tools, but you can’t copy their skills or their mana, right?” Sylver asked, as one of the Estus’ managed to free himself from the tangled mess of wires and started to run towards the only exit from the room.

Sylver moved his hand and one of the dead Bigs that wasn’t a zombie flew into the air and landed in Estus’ path. The dead body wiggled its arms around, and Estus was once again ensnared in the mess of wires.

Sylver was about to say something again, but his robe reacted and lifted him in the air, as the Sylver near his feet finished reforming and missed Sylver’s very recently healed left foot by the width of a hair. Sylver’s robe flicked Salgok’s dagger out of the fake’s hand.

Sylver watched as the fake Sylver turned back into smoke and moved through the cage of wires and disappeared down the corridor leading out.

Sylver was about to follow it when he changed his mind.

“I see… So you can use perks, and presumably skills, that don’t use any mana,” Sylver guessed as he pulled all 3 Bigs corpses towards himself and reined in the 2 Runnels, and 3 Estus’.

“He’s getting away,” Estus said with a very odd mixture of panic and perfectly calmness.

Sylver didn’t see which one, given that they were all in one big pile right now.

“If he’s a direct copy of my body, he’s not going to get very far. I’ve got three-quarters of the periodic table flowing through my veins, I’m quite honestly surprised he had enough strength in him to walk, let alone fight me,” Sylver said, as he touched one of the Bigs’ and melted him into a large ball of [Coat Of Carrion].

Sylver coated all the wires coming out of the bundle and had them wrapped around the ball of invisible wires. He fully solidified his body and walked up to the trapped people and placed a hand on the nearest Estus.

“Huh… The parasites are in your brain, but they’re sitting between the folds… And you’ve got no soul and no mana core…” Sylver said mostly to himself.

Runnel screamed as he pulled as hard as he could, and succeeded in having a wire cut through his armor and slice his shoulder open.

Sylver got a better grip on the Estus he was touching and used [Coat Of Carrion] to get all the many wires wrapped around him off so that he could pull him out. Estus immediately tried to reach into his bag, but his wrists were caught by the bright red liquid and were yanked behind his back and out of the way.

“Tell me, do any of you have any idea of what’s going on? How about you, king worm, or whatever you are?” Sylver asked while staring the Estus on the floor right in the eye.

He blinked several times before Sylver heard a popping sound from behind him and saw that both Runnels and the other Estus were dead. Dead worms leaked out of their open mouths, along with brown-tinged dark red blood. Sylver turned back to the Estus on the floor and saw that he was dead too.

“Brilliant,” Sylver said, as he gave his magic a second to build up before he released a cloud of [Draining Blight] to force its way into everyone’s bodies to collect whatever HP might be left.

While he waited for the cloud of dark red HP to steam out of the corpses, Sylver rummaged through Estus’ bag. Among a bunch of unlabeled bottles and various small tools, he didn’t quite understand the purpose of, Sylver found the thread and needle that he had been looking for.

He collected all of their tools and armor into his [Bound Bones] storage. The now nude corpses were then converted into a very large sphere of [Coat Of Carrion] that floated behind Sylver as he walked over to his own corpse.

The black-eyed dead man’s robe was in blood-soaked clumps and tatters. His eye was wide open, as was his tongueless mouth.

Sylver took a very deep breath before he crouched down next to the body and touched it. Sylver had to stop himself from physically jumping up in joy as he couldn’t find a single thing wrong with the body, save for the lack of mana channels and being infested to shit with dead worms.

Sylver touched the metallic eye in his left eye socket and stored it away into one of his bones. A small amount of [Coat Of Carrion] wrapped itself around Sylver’s hand and pointed finger, and with practiced ease, Sylver pulled the pitch-black eye out of his dead body.

Sylver turned the eyeball over in his hand and inspected it. Surprisingly enough the blackness wasn’t limited to the front, there wasn’t a single speck of white anywhere on the eyeball.

Sylver giggled for a moment and had to wait while he calmed down.

Finally, Sylver brought the eye up to his empty eye socket and pushed it inside, until it popped into place. Sylver kept both eyes closed while he waited for his optic nerves to connect and for the sealed-off blood vessels to open up again.

When Sylver opened his eyes, both of his eyes, it felt like taking a deep breath after nearly drowning. It seemed like such a small thing, primarily because Sylver forced himself to ignore it and not think about it, but having monocular vision was fucking awful.

Now he could once again tell how far away something was from him, without having to have his shades estimate the distance for him. Sylver blinked away the tear in his left eye, and wiped away the leaking blood with the edge of his robe, as he pulled his left foot’s boot off and sat down next to his own dead body.

He’d realized this would be an issue the moment he saw himself standing there, with one sleeve empty and hanging limply.

Sylver pulled the boot off his corpse’s right foot and looked at it.

Aside from the fact that I need to trim my toenails, and ignoring all the holes the worms made, it’s a perfectly good foot.

Sylver wished he had his surgery kit from Eira, but given that he wasn’t entirely sure how long the dungeon would let him sit around here undisturbed, he doubted he would have done any better even if he had his surgery kit. Using a pair of scissors Sylver had stored away from when he was in the sinking boat, he cut off all of the toes on the corpse’s foot.

Using the sharpest dagger that he had, Sylver sliced the remainder of the foot in half and then cut off the left side down so it would have the right angle.

Sylver cut off the very end of his left foot and attached the slab of right foot meat and bones onto it. He held it in place using magic, while he used sutures to make sure it stayed there. His toes were a little trickier, given that he had to swap them around, but it wasn’t all too difficult.

It wasn’t Sylver's best work, but it wasn’t his worst either. The dead worms slithered out of it, as Sylver filled the appendage with his mana and started the slow process of growing new mana channels.

He had a fully functional left foot now.

Sort of.

He had a good enough left foot, he couldn’t put his entire weight on it, but he would once the muscles adjusted and the bones fused themselves properly.

As for Sylver’s left arm…

He cut the corpse’s right arm off and attached it to his left shoulder.

The elbow joint would need to be corrected, and Sylver now had two right hands, but this wasn’t a foot where he didn’t care too much about the fine motor functions. He would fix it properly later when he was done with this dungeon.

Sylver stood up and pulled his left boot on, as he stretched his body and just enjoyed the feeling of finally not having to adjust his balance all the time. He walked around his corpse while staring at it, and hoped that the dungeon wouldn’t be too critical regarding what he was about to do.

Sylver had swallowed his own blood before…

Given that as far as he could tell this was a perfect copy of him…

It was basically the same as that…

Would this constitute as cannibalism?

Almost certainly yes, but is this enough wiggle room for me to say I’m not a cannibal?

Wait… back when I…

No, that didn’t count…

Sylver walked around the corpse and flexed his newly-acquired left-hand open and closed as he finished opening all of his arteries and his blood mixed with his dead copy’s blood.

Who’s going to know?

I’ll know, the dungeon will know, Spring will know, but other than that…

Sylver lifted his right foot up and tried to stand on his left foot’s toes. He felt the stitches strain and quickly went back to using only his heel to support himself.

Technically…

The fact that the worms inhabited the body means he’s a different race from me?

On that note, he didn’t have a soul…

He isn’t me, he’s…

Sylver continued circling the man’s body like a shark, even as blood slowly leaked out of him and spread out on the floor.

This would be the equivalent of eating… A tumor?

Still cannibalism though…

Self-cannibalism, no matter how you spin it…

Sylver heard a sound in the distance, and realized he wasn’t entirely certain where this concern was coming from. He’d drank his own blood before, during rituals, he was already a cannibal, even if he didn't want to admit it to himself.

But…

At the end of the day, Sylver cared more about his survival and saving Edmund, than he cared if he was a cannibal or not.

Sylver crouched down while he stared at his dead self in the holes where his eyes used to be.

Sylver was careful as he cut the dead man’s chest open, and was mildly surprised at how empty it was. His metallic ribcage had apparently not copied into the dead man’s body, and neither did any of the runes or the needle.

The heart had several dead worms trapped between the outer walls and the thin layer of fat, but Sylver scraped them off easily enough.

He touched the body with his left hand and stored it away, while he looked at the heart in his right hand.

His heart.

Sylver stared at it as he stood up and started to slowly walk towards the exit.

If I-

“Oh, who fucking cares. I’m a cannibal. I thought I’d crossed all the lines I was ever going to cross, but wouldn’t you fucking know it,” Sylver said to himself, as he bit down onto the still warm heart like he would an apple.

He quickly chewed the tough piece of meat and forced down the rest of it before he could change his mind.

The feeling of wrongness sat heavily in his stomach, as the chunks of meat were digested.

Luckily for Sylver, he had a distraction.

He had been too preoccupied with this odd situation to pay attention to his surroundings, and now saw that there were 3 identical men he hadn’t seen before standing in the corridor and staring at him with a shocked look on their faces.

“What? You fuckers ready to fucking talk or are we going to fucking fight?” Sylver asked, as he flicked both of his right hands and made a dagger appear in each one.

The three identical men looked at each other for a moment, before they reached into their pockets and pulled out three identical massive guns.

Every single shot was perfect; they must have hit Sylver right through the forehead at least 15 times in under a second.

Not that it did anything, as the illusion broke apart, and the men started to frantically look around the seemingly empty room. Sylver fell from the ceiling and landed directly on top of the one in the middle, and crossed his legs over his neck, and snapped it with a single twist of his body.

[??? (Warrior+Warrior+Warrior+Eagle Eyed+Rogue) Defeated!]

[Due to defeating an enemy 20 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

The other two were quick to react, but the bright red darts Sylver shoved through the back of their skulls were a little quicker.

[??? (Warrior+Warrior+Warrior+Eagle Eyed+Rogue) Defeated!]

[Due to defeating an enemy 20 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

[??? (Warrior+Warrior+Warrior+Eagle Eyed+Rogue) Defeated!]

[Due to defeating an enemy 20 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

[Necromancer] has reached level 100!]

+50AP

[2 perks available for [Necromancer]]

[Maximum level for [Necromancer] reached]

Sylver waited for a second for the dead body he was sitting on to fall down so he could get off it, but oddly enough the man remained standing up.

Sylver felt like something dragged a sharp blade along his soul, and looked around the…

Completely white room.

The metal walls were gone, the blood splatters were gone, and the only thing Sylver could see was himself, and some sort of wooden door.

Sylver’s feet touched the floor and he realized he was completely nude. He looked around and couldn’t even find the dead body he had been sitting on a moment prior.

With little else to do, Sylver walked over to the wooden door and opened it.