-

-

Ch271-Eye Mask

-

-

Sylver opened his hand and closed it into a fist.

His entire arm was slathered in the poison that the gauntlet had tried to inject into his wrist but missed since Sylver had made his skin swell, so the thorns couldn’t get to the area they were meant to pierce.

The inside of the gauntlet was like sticky sandpaper as if someone slathered it with honey and sprinkled in coarse salt.

He continued to open and close his hand as he approached the hole in the wall, and as he reached into it, he felt something press down on his shoulder.

He didn’t panic, placed his feet in a good position to kick off the wall, and had Dai stand near him with giant swords ready to slice his arm off.

The yellow jelly waited until it was pulling hard enough that Sylver couldn’t move his arm, pressed down on the gauntlet, from the sides, the top, and the bottom.

Despite his best magical efforts his bloated flesh was squashed under the pressure and leaked into the gauntlet, like an egg that was leaking out of its shell into boiling water, except instead of boiling water, his skin was sucked up into several thousand tiny holes in the gauntlet’s interior.

He didn’t swear, out loud, he had pre-emptively snipped the nerves in his shoulder and couldn’t feel anything below it. He had hoped he’d be able to recover the arm but realistically had written the whole limb the moment he put it into the gauntlet.

After about 30 seconds, the gauntlet was pressed so tightly around his arm that it had effectively replaced his skin. In theory, he could still take his arm out, but all his skin and most of the muscles would stay behind.

The yellow jelly released its grip and was kind enough to lift the ring so it was in Sylver’s hand.

Once he got a firm grip on it, he began to pull.

Like when he tried it with his [Black Mass] arm, there was a distant thump, followed by a second thump.

Sylver pulled so hard that his whole body shook from the effort, his chest felt as if it was going to catch on fire from the muscle strain. He could feel that the ring was moving, but every single millimetre was an awful struggle.

Fraction of a millimetre, by painfully slow fraction of a millimetre, Sylver pulled the ring and kept pulling, until finally there was a barely audible third distant thump.

He almost released the ring out of relief, but thankfully his fingers were frozen in position and wouldn’t have let go even if he wanted them to.

The weight on the other side of the ring decreased with every inch and every distant thump, and as Sylver pulled the ring to the edge of the hole and out of the yellow acidic jelly, a single hook lowered into view.

Arm numb in more than simply the physical sense, Sylver placed the ring onto the hook and used the wall to steady himself as he waited for the magical sparks flying up and down his skeleton to settle down.

By the time he caught his metaphorical breath and his brain stopped boiling in its own juices the surrounding fast-moving streams of white sand had slowed down to a trickle.

It floated like snowflakes and gathered behind him, in the area he had entered the room through, and created a giant wall of calm white sand.

The floor started to vibrate under his feet, and slowly but surely, it rotated towards the left, and eventually, the hole Sylver had stuck his hand into disappeared into the floor. The floor kept turning and stopped when there was a triangular gap between the floor and the wall.

His robe picked him off the floor and very careful so as not to scrape Ria off his chest, moved him feet first through the opening.

As Sylver was lowered onto the ground, the opening he came through slammed shut in the time it would take to blink and left him in total darkness. Sadly the darkness didn’t last.

The air was stale, and wet like he had shoved his head into a sack filled with rotten fruit, and the aggressively bright red blinking lights on the floor, walls, and ceiling made his [Perfect Night Vision] flicker on and off and after 2 steps he closed his eyes and relied on his mana sense.

The square corridor was small enough that he could reach the ceiling with his hand, and the further Sylver walked, the more he heard a humming sound behind him.

With every step, the humming got louder and louder.

As he was in the process of having a shade materialize to walk behind him, the shade burst, on account of an invisible to the naked, and magical, eye “string” slowly following Sylver down the suddenly narrow corridor.

He reached out towards the string with his robe, and the ease with which the string sliced through his enchanted robe made it look like it was cheap flimsy toilet paper.

As the robe fragments floated downwards, they passed through the other strings and were cut up into even smaller fragments.

They were too small to be used as confetti by the time they reached the floor.

The humming increased in pitch to the point it sounded more like a child screaming than a hum, and as Sylver began to sprint down the narrow corridor, the invisible mesh of wires followed him, and although he couldn’t stop to check, he was fairly certain it had sliced the back of his boots more than once as he ran.

He briefly considered passing through the wires using [Fog Form] but he couldn’t see the wires, couldn’t tell where the gaps were, and the chance of one of them cutting his needle into two was too great for him to risk it.

Sylver was so focused on the deadly wires behind him, that he barely noticed the 45-degree pole sticking out of the wall, and didn’t even have time to react as his robe shoved his head down and pushed him through the gap between the pole and the wall.

The 45-degree pole was followed by 2 poles that made a cross, a pole 1/3 of the way to the left, a pole 1/3 of the way to the right, within what felt like a single breath his robe pushed and pulled his body through the gaps without once slowing him down.

A single touch of one of the poles was enough for Sylver to know these were reinforced enough that he could break straight through them, but it would take a half second more than he believed he had as he ran away from the invisible wires.

At the exact moment he got into a sort of rhythm, where he might have been able to give himself a moment to think about how to handle the wires, the flashing red lights started to flash yellow, and a black glass wall appeared a few meters ahead of him.

There was a white circle with a red dot in the middle of it, in the top left corner of the wall, and as Sylver reached it, his robe reached out and smacked it. The wall that was blocking his path disappeared and revealed about 30 oddly angled poles that stuck out at horrible angles, at the end of which was another black glass wall with a target in the bottom right corner.

Sylver passed through another 9 black glass walls before the yellow lights turned green, and behind the 10th wall, there was what initially appeared to be a perfectly straight path but turned out to be a path littered with completely invisible poles, and matching invisible walls with targets on them.

The first 2 Sylver’s robe smacked at random, but by the 3rd wall he realized it was the exact same layout as the walls and pole he had been running through when the lights were yellow, and although the obstacle course was a far cry from “easy,” it was a lot more manageable.

Sylver smacked the 10th invisible wall’s target, passed through it, passed through a wall of falling glowing white sand, and landed on a large circular platform.

Similar to the platform at the entrance, there was a pedestal in the middle of it. But instead of a gauntlet, there was a mask, the sort that only covered the eyes, and barely reached the ears.

It was the kind you would see at a ball, decorated with all manners of feathers and cloths, but this one was completely black, made out of what appeared to be glass, same as the gauntlet.

Sylver walked around the pedestal and the mask, pulled his gauntlet-covered arm out of his robe’s sleeve, and massaged the shoulder the gauntlet was attached to.

He crouched down so he was at eye level with the mask’s eye holes, and wondered what the soul hiding inside it was going to do once he put it on.

Gut reaction, it was going to possess him, shove his soul out of its socket, and steal his body.

The poison in the gauntlet was likely meant to wear him down, the ring pulling was meant to exhaust them, and the obstacle course would have made a living person use up every drop of magic and stamina they had to survive and leave them too tired to think clearly when they reached the mask.

Sylver shrugged his shoulder as the muscles and skin swelled and contracted for a few seconds and created the general shape of a human face.

Sylver forced the skin on his shoulder into the shape of a nose, and after he took a moment to deeply sigh, popped out his left eyeball and placed it into his shoulder’s eye hole.

A piece of [Black Mass] wrapped around Sylver’s finger, and after a couple of seconds, looked like a deflated balloon hanging off a string.

He placed the balloon inside his shoulder’s mouth, pulled it down, and after a bit of adjusting the mouth had a rudimentary lung, small human-shaped vocal cords, lips, and lastly a tongue with just enough teeth that the jaw sat comfortably.

He double-checked that the muscles were arranged properly, remembered to make a hole to connect the nose and the “throat,” and when the face was good enough for someone to talk through, he pulled it out of his shoulder slightly, to the point that it had something resembling a neck.

It wasn’t his cleanest work, but it was good enough for this.

As soon as his fingers touched the mask, his left gauntlet-wearing hand squeaked and grabbed the mask.

It held it by the eye holes and used its initial movement to swing it into Sylver’s face.

But the gauntlet-wearing hand stopped about 5 inches from being placed on his eyes.

The gauntlet shook, creaked, liquid dribbled out of the back of the elbow, and with a faint smile, Sylver took the mask out of the gauntlet’s hand with his uncovered hand.

The black bones inside the gauntlet forced it down to his side, he placed the mask onto the face-shaped tumour he had grown on his shoulder.

Needles pierced around the eyes pierced through the cartilage of the nose, a curved needle went down into the jaw, looped upward, and came out through the nose.

Barely visible glassy strings entered through the holes in the half skull made of compressed fat, and with a squeak, the mask pressed itself into the fat that would have been bone and burrowed itself into the skin.

The soul inside the mask… It tried to grab at the “brain,” high above in Sylver’s head, but like a man trapped in an underwater cave, it quickly stopped trying to get to the distant surface and made do with the nearby trapped cave air.

Which in this case was a collection of muscle strands that had been bundled together into the rough shape of a human brain.

Sylver felt his shoulder come to life, in a certain sense of the word, he’d snipped his nerves when he first put on the gauntlet, but he could feel his skin being pulled as the “mouth” opened and made an attempt to scream.

The sound that came out was a hoarse whispery “haa” as Sylver restricted the airflow in the face’s half cup of a lung.

While the face tried to scream, Sylver’s gauntlet-covered arm vibrated as the gauntlet tried to pull the mask off the tumour on his shoulder, but what little strength it managed to gather from pulling on Sylver’s muscle strands were no match for his enchanted bones.

Sylver waited what felt like a good minute, but the mask continued its attempt to scream and tore the meat inside the gauntlet apart as it tried to overpower Sylver’s bones.

In terms of souls, it felt like being in a sword fight with a child, Sylver didn’t even need to draw his blade and simply kept the young thing away by holding its head with his hand while it fruitlessly swung at the air between them.

Once he decided enough time passed he leaned forward and turned his head to look at the masked head on his shoulder and saw that the mask had embedded itself into the “face,” and had moulded it into a shape that looked nothing like the face Sylver originally constructed.

The moment they made eye contact, he knew the thing in the mask wasn’t human.

That it had never been “alive.”

It wasn’t undead, it was too far removed from the concept of mortality to sit anywhere on that sliding scale, but it wasn’t demonic or godly either…

He allowed a good minute to pass but the masked thing remained silent.

“I want to get to Tenochitan. Tenochtiton? Tenochi-chtan?” Sylver gestured vaguely upwards, “the city at the end of these trials. What do you want in exchange for helping me get to it?” Sylver asked.

The masked bundle of skin, muscle, and sinew closed its mouth and just stared at him.

“If you’re after this body, it’s on the negotiating table. As is a brand-new body that I can mould into whatever shape you desire. Can be one of the locals, or I can bring in someone foreign,” Sylver offered.

The face just stared at him.

Sylver stared back and noticed something.

The black eye that was looking at him through the mask’s eyehole was black.

But not the way Sylver’s eyeballs were black, the mask’s eye was the colour black. A deep, dark, velvety black, but it was unmistakably black.

Sylver’s eyes appeared to be black, but they were black the way a shadow was black, the way the sky was, an empty lack of light sort of thing.

Whereas Sylver could almost see light reflecting off the mask’s shiny black eyeball.

“Can you help me get to it? Or are you part of the trial?” Sylver asked.

Yes. Yes.

If he didn’t have direct contact with the thing, he wouldn’t have noticed the reaction in its soul. Despite how foreign it felt, there was enough common ground that Sylver felt confident that his interpretation was correct.

“Can you speak? Blink once for yes, twice for no,” Sylver said.

Yes. There was a reaction in the soul, but the thing didn’t blink.

“Do I need you to get to the city?” Sylver asked.

Wobbly reaction, the mask either didn’t know or it wasn’t a simple yes or no answer.

Sylver squinted at the creature behind the mask.

“Alright… You’re from a different realm... Where you were a sort of deity that’s faded due to a lack of worshipers in this realm… These trials are used to weaken people enough for you to possess them… And the Ten-whatever city is composed of possessed bodies…” Sylver said with ever-increasing confidence as he hit one bullseye after the other.

“You use the sunlight that hits the mountain top to sustain yourself… No, not that… You use the sacrifices the people below kill on their pyramids as sustenance… No, warm, but not quite… You’re so weak a single soul is enough to sustain you individually? No on the weak, yes on the single soul… Hmm…”

The mask hadn’t reacted, not physically at least, but before it had been constantly reaching out towards Sylver’s soul, and now it was as if it realized it flying towards a fire, and retreated into itself. It had even given up on making the gauntlet-covered arm move.

“Texi-something, skin wearer… You need your host to possess a likeness to you… Is that the purpose of the trials? To make the testers animalistic because you’re all closer to animals than people? Lukewarm, but no… Poison, test of strength, test of speed… test of dexterity. Constitution, strength, dexterity, so were you supposed to test my intelligence and wisdom?” Sylver asked.

Sylver started off red hot but was barely lukewarm by the time he reached his conclusion. While he spoke the masked tumour didn’t blink, nod, or do anything apart from stare at Sylver with an unreadable expression.

“Ah… I see… And to test how intelligent and wise I am, you’d need to enter my thoughts, which you obviously cannot do… I don’t suppose you’ll take my word that I’m the smartest person in this whole entire jungle mountain?” Sylver asked.

There was a reaction from the mask, but it was weak, more likely than not it found the very notion of this situation being resolved this easily funny.

Sylver smiled at the mask, but its face remained in that ever-consistent mixture of neutral and confused beyond words.

Sylver turned his face away from the mask and cracked his neck to relieve the pressure that had built up from holding his head at such an uncomfortable angle.

He walked over to the edge of the circular platform, pushed his hand through the falling sand, and placed his palm flat against the smooth stone wall.

He kicked his boot against the floor and left a scuff mark on it.

He found what he was looking for after only 10 steps but walked the whole circle just to be sure.

Back at the spot that Sylver had found 20 minutes ago, he touched his hand around the area, followed the hollow feeling in the stone downwards, and after more touching and prodding, followed it back to the floor of the platform.

He kept his hand on the floor and duck-walked as he followed the hollow space in the stone floor. As he followed the line, his hand ended up at the pedestal in the dead centre of the platform.

Sylver stood up from his crouch, leaned over the pedestal, and saw that there was a gauntlet-shaped hole where the mask had been sitting. Sylver lifted his left arm upwards, so the masked tumour could see him.

“I stand by my claim to be the smartest person in this jungle. I never claimed to be the most observant, and… why am I explaining myself to you, it’s not like you’re going to be able to tell anyone anyway,” Sylver said as he inserted his gauntlet into the gauntlet-shaped hole.

The grooves of the hole aligned perfectly with the gauntlet, and as if it were a literal key, Sylver turned it anticlockwise.

The pedestal split down the middle and released Sylver’s arm, slammed into the floor, the mechanism hidden underneath the stone floor clicked and scratched along the line he had followed, reached the wall, and as the sand falling from above stopped falling, the stone platform began to slowly lift itself upwards.

As Sylver felt the presence of people above him, he covered up the masked head on his shoulder with his robe, adjusted his posture, puffed up the torso portion of his robe to hide the fact that his arms were different lengths, and placed a perfect copy of the mask on his shoulder, on his face.

The [Black Mass] mask copy pushed down on the edges of Sylver’s skin, to create the illusion that it had pressed and replaced the skin around his eyes, eye, and a bunch of half-dressed expendable pirate shades materialized around him and began to attack him.

He armed himself with a dagger in each hand, stabbed at least 30 shades, but every time one disappeared into a cloud of smoke, a brand new one appeared behind it and took its place.

A shade armed with a short sword hit his wrists with the hilt and made him drop his daggers, the shades jumped on his back, kicked the back of his knees, an arm wrapped around his neck in a chokehold, they pulled him to the ground and kicked at his stomach and groin as they quite literally piled on top of him.

A foot landed on the left side of his face, kicked his head downward, and once his head bounced off the floor with a nice loud dense thunk he went limp.

For roughly 5 seconds the large pile of dark creatures wailed on him, naked fists struck tough skin, elbows struck kneecaps, wooden clubs broke against forehead, a shade with a thin foot got very unlucky and slipped past Sylver’s carefully positioned crossed thighs and struck him straight in the unmentionables.

Thankfully he managed to remain silent and seemingly unconscious, and a split second after a soul landed on the moving platform 2 steps away from the pile of shades, swung its weapon at them, and the pile burst into a thick cloud of darkness.

Sylver’s face was swollen and bruised, covered in bright red blood, there were circular dents along his skull around the mask, the skin on his neck and chin were sliced up, and bubbles of red formed along the edges of his lips as he breathed in and out.

The soul that was standing over Sylver was strange, it was stable, but it felt like it was unravelled, almost hollow, like it was a walking ball of loose wool yarn.

As the platform reached the top, more souls approached him, and all of them had that odd sort of unravelling feeling to them.

As a woman’s hand pressed two fingers against his neck, he made the muscle underneath the skin expand and contract to imitate a pulse.

The physical contact gave him enough of a connection to realize why the woman’s soul felt as fuzzy as it did.

“It’s weak but he’s alive,” the woman said in perfect clear Eirish.

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

“What were those things?” a man’s voice asked on Sylver’s left.

“Why isn’t he healing?” a different man’s voice asked on Sylver’s right.

“Does anyone recognize him?” a child’s voice that stood next to Sylver’s feet asked.

A crowd of fuzzy souls surrounded him from all sides, it was like laying underneath a pile of itchy sweaters.

Which was a perfect analogy to describe these things because if Sylver’s soul sense was to be believed they were sweaters.

Sweaters that had hooked themselves into the skin of their wearers and used their barbed woollen strands to move the bodies around like marionets.

The woman who was taking his pulse placed her other hand on the other side of his neck, she pressed down on his skin, and Sylver felt her attempt to inject mana into him.

There was a puff of smoke from where her fingers had touched his skin, and she gasped as she fell over and hit the back of her head against the knees of the people standing behind her.

Roughly 20 different people simultaneously asked some variation of “what happened/are you alright?” as she placed her scorched fingers into her mouth and tried as hard as she could to suck out the dark mana Sylver’s magic had blasted her with.

The crowd collectively stepped back from Sylver’s unconscious body, except the soul that spoke with a child’s voice, and a soul that was yet to speak that was standing next to Sylver’s left hand, the one covered in the gauntlet.

His eye was closed, and out of caution he refrained from looking around via [Lesser Perception], but he could tell the soul standing next to his gauntlet was paying very close attention to the poison-slathered piece of armour.

“Nobody touch him,” the woman who touched Sylver said through the burned fingers in her mouth.

“He’s Belo’s other half…” the child near Sylver’s feet said almost too quietly for anyone to hear.

The fuzzy moving souls froze solid, their hosts' bodies stopped mid-breath.

The soul inside the mask on Sylver’s shoulder tried to suck in a breath, positioned its mouth to yell, but its lung didn’t expand to breathe in, its vocal cords twisted into a knot, and as Sylver’s robe held its jaw shut, the skin that made up its lips melted shut.

To shut it up even further, Sylver tightened the skin that composed the creature’s face until it couldn’t move a single muscle.

“Black mask, black arm, black eyes, black magic, white skin, white hair, it’s him,” the child added.

The woman who had touched Sylver stood up from the floor and took her fingers out of her mouth.

“Gather bedsheets and 2 long sticks, we’ll make a stretcher to carry him. And send someone to wake Belo,” the woman said, presumably while gesturing at the people she was ordering around.

Within a matter of minutes, a folded bedsheet was pulled underneath Sylver, and once the people realized he was too heavy to lift, they modified the stretcher and dragged him on the floor with the sheets wrapped underneath his armpits.

While Sylver squashed the silenced face on his shoulder down as much as he could without “killing” it, he risked a glance at his surroundings.

He timed it with his body being jostled by one of the men adjusting his grip on the stick they were pulling and opened his eyelid halfway for less than a tenth of a second.

High in the air, so high that it was more sky, than ceiling, there was what the average person might think to be a white carpet.

Or an upside-down field of white flowers.

Or a beach made up of tiny glistening pearls.

The sheer quantity was alarming, but not as alarming as the equally large shadow and presence Sylver saw and felt moving underneath the sand.

He told Spring to send every available shade out to find Nels, so he could call Edmund to help him wrap this adventure up and call it a day.