Lola was in Sylver’s workshop down below. Sylver asked Ria and Chrys to go along with Misha and Masha to clean up and have breakfast and such because Sylver needed to have a very private chat with Lola.

Chrys had an odd smile on her face as the two sisters led her away, but by the looks of things, she had decided to keep that particular joke to herself.

He would later be told that Chrys asked Maul, the house chef, to make her pancakes, which she ate until she felt sick, and then fell asleep at the table.

Ging, with the help of Benny, carried the small girl to one of the empty bedrooms, where she would sleep for nearly 18 hours.

Sylver reached a small hole hidden behind a bookshelf and didn’t even bother coming to a full stop, as he simply sent a burst of fog through the hole, and materialized on the other side.

It felt like trying to put on a coat that you had grown out of. The sleeves were so tight that you couldn’t even fit your hands through them, it creaked at the seams from the mere attempt, and Sylver didn’t even try to zip it up.

How mana is perceived, is 100% dependent on the person inspecting it. While mana does have a “fingerprint,” in a certain sense of the word, describing a person’s mana was akin to describing an abstract painting, one of those that’s made entirely out of colorful splatters and splashes.

Now that Sylver had some of his Silver Lich mana coursing through his veins, the slurry swimming inside his workshop was embarrassingly pathetic.

For a while, Sylver just stood there and breathed it all in.

Contrary to popular belief, there wasn’t a stench of death and decay, if anything, there was a hint of lavender for some reason. Proper necromancers kept their workspaces clean and sterile, it was only the corpse fuckers that enjoyed walking around with their sleeves soaked in blood and feces.

“He had my mother’s sword,” Lola said from the corner of the room.

“…”

Sylver ran his hand along the polished clean metal tables as he walked towards Lola, and nudged the various souls trapped and funneled down into the workshop, out of the way.

“The city was being overwhelmed by Krists when the [Hero] arrived. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that he fended them off single-handedly, but the local nobility certainly believes he did,” Lola explained, as Sylver sat down onto his own shadow using [Deadly Darkness].

“The Krists started acting up around 3 years ago. Everyone assumed that once their island base was destroyed they would-”

“The [Hero] had your mother’s sword, so you traded with him to get it, is that correct,” Sylver interrupted, and could almost physically feel the nerve he had just ripped into.

There was a long pause.

That in different circumstances would have resulted in a slap across the face. When something as serious as a [Hero] is the topic of conversation, there were very few people from whom Sylver tolerated a long dramatic pregnant pause.

“What do you want me to say?” Lola asked, and Sylver was thankfully too shocked to react in any way other than silently staring at her.

In three short steps, Sylver was standing close enough to Lola that he could feel her slightly panicked breathing on the wispy edges of his robe’s collar.

“I want to know exactly what the [Hero] did, said, what he touched, who he spoke to, how he talked, which language, did he sound angry, sad, what was his level, where did you meet, did you find him, did he find you, which sword specifically was he carrying, what-”

Sylver leaned away as Lola opened the palm of her hand in front of her, and a dark red blade appeared between them. The hilt was a bright golden color, and the slightly tarnished dark red blade was bent at a 45-degree angle. There were slightly glowing dark green cracks at the bent area, with a couple of the cracks spiraling as they traveled through the metal.

Lola tried to talk but all that came out was a high-pitched squeak. She had droplets of water forming in both of her eyes.

“Look at it,” she whispered.

3 very distinct emotions made themselves known inside Sylver.

One was a happiness that he could barely contain, let alone put into words.

Another was fear, which felt like throwing water on a red hot piece of metal.

And the last, and the one that muffled the other two, was anger.

Which was immediately snuffed out, and stuffed in a jar high up on a shelf, as Sylver remembered he wasn’t in a position to act out on the aforementioned anger.

There was a difference between being confident, and being stupid.

And starting a fight with a [Hero], was about the dumbest thing any person, creature, or thing, could ever do.

Unless you had enough power to defy a god’s will and knew exactly what you were doing.

Even then, it was still a huge fucking risk.

Sylver had a decision to make.

Sadly, there was barely any point considering his options, because he knew all of them, and knew the consequences. As much as it was about to hurt him and Lola in the short term, being honest always worked out in the end.

“Lola… I’m going to talk for a while, and you’re going to listen to me. I will answer any questions you may have after I’m done so… please don’t interrupt me,” Sylver said with a sigh and a shrug of his shoulders, as Lola lowered the faintly glowing sword in her hand.

Sylver dragged his hands over his face as if to wipe away sweat, and gave himself and Lola a couple of moments to compose themselves.

“The sword in your hand is a fake. I don’t recognize or understand the magic being used, but I can see the effect it’s having on you. The [Hero] has tricked you. And you’re not going to do anything about it,” Sylver said calmly and kept his tone relaxed and level.

Somehow Lola either suppressed her reaction to the point that Sylver couldn’t even feel it in her soul, or she already knew. The slight shivering of her lower lip and the faint redness in her face pointed to some sort of spell that prevented Sylver from feeling her soul properly, or more likely, some sort of enchantment.

“You’re not going to look for the [Hero], you’re not going to send anyone after him, as far as anyone is concerned, he has successfully fooled you, and that is the extent of your relationship with him. You won’t think about him, you won’t ask me about him, and once we’re done talking, we are never speaking about him ever again. Ever,” Sylver explained, and with each tentative step could feel more and more of the alien magic emanating from the damaged sword.

Lola’s throat moved in a way that suggested that there was a lump she couldn’t swallow, or that she was about to say something. He spoke before she could.

“Lola… I could have lied to you, and pretended that was your mother’s sword. I can just barely sense the spell on it, and I apologize if this sounds demeaning, but if I can barely tell it’s a fake, you definitely can’t. And-”

Sylver briefly closed his eyes as Lola disappeared in a bright flash of light.

When he opened them, he immediately found the alteration to the spell that should have prevented this and was oddly more proud than annoyed that Misha managed to understand the framework well enough to edit it without destroying it.

“Do you want me to go after her?” Spring asked as he materialized a step away from where Lola had been standing and picked up the sword she had left behind it. It had fallen onto the floor and was partially embedded into the reinforced stone.

The blade slid out effortlessly, as Spring pulled it out, and inspected it for a couple of seconds.

“No… She needs time to process things, I trust she won’t do anything stupid…” Sylver said as he took the sword from Spring’s hands, and very gently carried it over to one of the polished metal tables.

The blade wobbled back and forth, as Sylver put it down, and searched through the drawers until he found what he was looking for.

“Was she always this rude? I remember her being a lot less rude before,” Spring mentioned, as Sylver held up a vial with a colorless liquid inside of it, and poured it over the slightly glowing green cracks on the sword.

“She wasn’t rude… Well, I did say no teleporting when I’m around, especially inside my own house, but it’s been 5 years, she probably got used to teleporting whenever she wanted. More likely, she understood that I wasn’t going to budge on the [Hero] situation, so she left to clear her head… Not to mention, I doubt she’s all that happy about me revealing the sword she thought her mother made is a fake,” Sylver explained, as the colorless liquid turned foamy.

It fizzled and seemed to boil as if the green cracks on the blade were extremely hot.

Sylver worked in silence for a while, gently poking and prodding the crack, while Spring walked around and made the shades move things until they were all in their proper place.

“About Ria…” Spring said, in a way that sounded as if he wasn’t sure what he was about to say.

“Depending on what she wants to do; I’m thinking of having a golem made for her. So she can walk around, make friends, and all that… I’ll admit I would prefer to have her come with us… She’s like a skeleton key when it comes to magical barriers and locks. If a concentrated abyss plane couldn’t do anything to her, there isn’t much in Eira that could hurt her,” Sylver explained, as he tapped a glass rod against the foaming bright green liquid, and it wrapped around the glass rod as if it were cotton candy.

“You could have her slither all the way to the source of the barrier, and shut it down… Or just make a small hole in the barrier, for you to fog through... Not to mention she can do that net thing around your body, to protect you from holy magic, and such…” Spring counted out, as Sylver gently pulled the glass rod away from the glowing sword, and pushed it down into a beaker full of a dark red powder.

As he pulled the glass rod out, the dark red powder made a hissing noise, as the glowing green goo sunk to the bottom, and the glass rod was now completely clean.

“There’s that, but there’s also the fact that she’s the only one who seems to be able to see a certain topic we can’t discuss. And it goes without saying, true loyalty isn’t something you can buy. And… It is nice to have someone with a fresh perspective around. Someone to question my methods, reasoning, tactics-”

“I always-”

“Someone who doesn’t already know what I’m going to say before I say it, and therefore makes any argument we might have, largely pointless. If I don’t think I’m wrong, you don’t think I’m wrong, so if you’re trying to poke a hole in my reasoning, you’re doing it armed with the same knowledge I am. And given that I’m objectively smarter than you, if I can’t find a fault in my reasoning, you won’t find it either,” Sylver explained, as he repeatedly pulled wrappings of green glowing foam out of the sword, and sunk it into the dark red powder.

“You know who was great at poking holes in things? Rook. The shade could out plan Aether. He was a psychopath to end all psychopaths. If I hadn’t killed him, I have no doubt he would have eventually ruled the world,” Sylver explained, as the sword moaned with a noise that sounded like a cat, more than metal, and ever so slightly straightened out.

“Rook… Oh yeah, the king tyrant, I remember now… Why was he so thin when you made him into a shade?” Spring asked, as Sylver covered the fake sword with a piece of cloth to keep out of view, and focused on the beaker half full of green glowing goop, and dark red clumps of powder floating above it.

“The shade conversion process wasn’t as smooth back then. I focused too much on his mind and fucked up his body. But he said he enjoyed the unnatural limberness his new form gave him, so I just left him like that,” Sylver explained, as he turned away from the small beaker and faced Lola.

He could smell the slightly tangy scent of dwarven black ale, presumably due to the large stain on the front of Lola’s robe. She had a small book in her left hand, and the aforementioned black ale, in an open bottle in the other.

“My mother’ses sword would never bend,” Lola said with a giggly slur in her voice.

She lifted the book in the air and limply threw it towards Sylver. He caught it with his shadow before it hit the floor, and moved it into his hand.

“It’s all there. Whats he said, what he ate, who he talked to, what about, everything. I knew you’d get your panties in a twist over him,” Lola explained, as she used one of the polished clean tables for support, and then floated up a little, to sit on it.

Sylver considered voicing his opinion of drinking at the first sign of trouble but decided against it. He walked over to Lola, who now had her face pressed against the cool metal, and appeared to be moments away from passing out.

He also briefly considered asking Lola what exactly prompted her to drink herself into a coma, but as she fully lay down and looked up at him with tears freely pouring out of her eyes, he decided against it.

Lola mumbled for a while, about how she knew the sword was a fake, before she leaned over, threw up onto Sylver’s floor, and then passed out on one of his operating tables. He had Ging bring him a blanket and pillow to make her comfortable.

After Ging cleaned up the vomit and used magic to get rid of the smell, Sylver went back to using the trace amounts of Edmund’s green magic to make a tracker.

He would later be told that Lola had teleported into her office, trashed it in a screaming fit of rage, then drank three bottles of black ale to calm herself down before she went back to Sylver to try and talk to him.

Sylver left her alone to sleep it off, while he read through Lola’s report, as he waited for the tracker to solidify.