You know, there’s a special kind of misery that every Master-Tier Pathbearer experiences. It’s the kind of misery that comes when you live long enough and survive enough fights, because by the end, the System is going to put you against someone like you. Worse; eventually, it’s going to find someone who has your number.
It was on the border of Lone Star that I found mine. Orcs… Don’t let anyone tell you that they’re stupid creatures. They make use of mercenaries as well, and just about anyone will work with them. They can be expected to keep their word sometimes, even. Especially if you’re strong enough. Especially if you will offer them a good fight in the future. Orcs got a strange sense of rationality to them.
One such person is an elf by the name of Earth Moves. Real stupid name, maybe, but every Gate Raider knows who that one is. He started building fortresses for these orcs, and I was on the other side, trying to smash through so the boys and girls of Lone Star could finish the job with their artillery. Except, it wasn’t that easy of a job for me. Because Earth Moves was a good godsdamn Geomancer. And more than being a felling good Geomancer, he was also a Master Dynamancer—which meant he could manipulate all the major forces that hold existence together as well.
With all that power, he built a massive city-sized, mobile, self-mending fortress. Everything I broke, he reassembled. And his protections were more than just metal or stone or something solid. It was the air. He created a magnetic hurricane, and started flinging out steel shards at people using the thunderstorm he called in.
I tried pushing in five times. He beat me like I was his unwanted stepchild every time—even with support. And did I fold over and give up just because someone was better than me at being a Pathbearer?
No. I called my wife and all the other Masters I knew to help me. Another thing about Earth Moves—he’s good, but also a colossal asshole. He’s on his own. You don’t do well on your own.
There’s another lesson that most Master Tiers get to learn at some point. It is another ugly lesson. You’re going to run into someone better than you, but there are plenty of people better than me laying dead in the mud. I’m still here because I dealt with the problem, and I was never truly alone.
Through a diversion and a storm of our own, we grounded him, and I built an even larger fort around his and pinned Earth Moves and the orcs in place. He might be better at making fortresses, but when it came to just smashing against each other with raw expendable material, I had the advantage, and without the bastard being able to fly, we had time.
What followed next, though, that’s another story. I’ll tell you all about the miseries of sieges and close quarters combat some other day.
-Memoirs of a Master-Tier War Mage
62 (I)
Dragons [III]
The kukri-wielding dragon’s blade glinted in the dark like a crescent star.
Shiv, comparatively, clenched his fists and took on a fighting stance of his own. He reached into his cloak and gathered a few bone drills with his Biomancy.
Time to test how fast this bastard is, Shiv thought. The dragon made a gesture with her off-hand, just a slight curl of a finger, teasing him, telling him to come forth—and he did. Just not the way she expected.
He launched a bone drill. It tore through the air—and hit nothing. The dragon dodged forward into the drill and vanished from the world. A second later, she rematerialized a few meters away, her immense presence chilling his skin.
Master-Tier Dodge, Shiv realized. He launched himself off the ground, just in time for the dragon to leave a deep gouge where he had been. All he caught was the afterimage of the kukri, the cut turning into a beam of light that sliced through the ground for hundreds of meters when it missed him.
Shiv fired two more drills and charged the dragon. She dodged through him. She materialized behind him, and she taunted him—tapping the flat of her blade against his back before he could turn and blurring away when another drill came for her. For a brief moment, he felt the heat of her blade but also the state of her Magical Resistance. She wasn’t nearly as durable as the Jealousy. But he still had to hit her.
And that wasn’t going to be easy.
“She moves like she is weightless,” Can Hu said. “She is testing us, learning our ways. Don’t strike blindly. Drag her in close; trade a blow if you have to. I will see if I can distract her with a drone.’
Just then, a solid tsunami of electrified metal twisted into the sky in the distance, arcing like massive fingers that upended a large section of the wilderness. Enormous chunks of land rose up behind the kukri-wielding dragon, and she shifted her stance.
While she held Shiv here, her fellow traitor knights were fighting the Shadow Cells and Shiv’s team. He needed to finish this fight. Fast.
Her knife twisted. A huge flame column rose in the corner of Shiv’s vision. The damned dragon then angled her blade, trying to reflect the light into his eyes. Shiv dashed left and circled her. She gave a scoffing laugh as she lowered the blade again, feinting.
He didn’t react. Lesser vampires were feinting bastards too—he could tell when someone wasn’t going to commit to the strike. There was something about the momentum being restrained.
“Ah, good instinct,” the dragon breathed.
He launched three more bone drills—the first to provoke, the second two wild guesses at where she was going to emerge after the dodge. The first shot hit nothing, the second she caught, and the third she deflected with her blade. She slashed with her blade, and a beam of searing light splashed against Shiv. He parried that with a push of his Magebreaker. The gauntlet rang. Then the dragon was on him in a sudden blast of speed.
Her blade came fast, glinting as she struck in an unpredictable pattern. Shiv was used to being the slower party, the weaker party, the inferior fighter. He learned to keep himself alive through preparation and aggression. The dragon was on another level entirely. She scored three light cuts along his helmet and dodged into a reverse-grip stab that smashed into his back. Shiv grunted but shrugged the hits off by twisting himself around them with his gravity field. But then she tapped the blade and vanished in a flash of golden mana. Suddenly, Shiv felt her drive the same reverse-grip stab into his back, nicking his armor and launching him off balance. He turned just as she channeled another beam of light, the intense heat washing over him—blinding him.
“Incoming tail!” Can Hu shouted. “From below!”
That was the only reason Shiv wasn’t struck dead-on. He caught the limb—and felt frost rush up his arms. His Adamantine Adaption struggled to adapt to two conditions at once, and the knife’s searing beam cleaved deeper. Shiv shoved her tail aside, but then she teleported—and speared her blade into his chest. Again, Can Hu warned Shiv, and he caught the blade with his hands, trying to twist it away from her.
Only for her to vanish into splashes of golden fractals and repeat the same reserve-grip strike into his back—spiking him to the dirt as he snarled in frustration and confusion.
“Chronomancy,” Can Hu said. “She has inflicted a fixed point in time on us. I will watch your back.”
Shiv righted himself with his field. Then, the dragon began her dance. Her blade flowed perfectly, without losing momentum. Slashes and stabs kept coming from every angle, and she was never still, growing faster with each second. Every impact shattered the earth and turned the soil into mush. Just then, Can Hu’s drones sailed across the sky and fired a series of missiles. The Dragon-Knight slashed both the missiles and drones apart with a flashing beam from her blade and vanished into gold again.
Can Hu warned Shiv of her next strike. He reached to catch the dragon—but she dodged through him first. Rather than using her knife, she latched her tail around his leg and discharged her Momentum Core. The world lurched around Shiv. He cursed and tried to hold himself steady. It was hopeless. She drove him into the ground. It was like being dragged by an avalanche moving at the speed of lightning. He tore another chasm through the world. Shiv’s absurd Toughness and Adamantine Adaption kept him from taking severe damage, but the chaos made him unable to get his bearings. He crashed against the earth three more times, and he only managed to tear chunks out of the ground with his gravitic field.
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And just as she started to slow, she triggered her Chronomancy again and drove her dagger into Shiv’s back with the partial power of a Momentum Core behind it.
Shiv felt her pierce through the outer layer of his armor before he adapted. He shrugged her aside with his gravity field and tore his own throat open. A wyrm sailed out from his hand thereafter, and it struck her wrist.
For the first time, he heard her grunt in surprise as a blast of crimson mana consumed them both.
She teleported again—materializing three hundred meters away, just beyond the reach of his Biomancy.
Shiv sneered. His armor was nicked and battered. But it was still holding. He pulled replacement bits of bone and molded it over the damage, sealing the small rents that her blade and blows left.
“Not much finesse for someone so small,” the dragon hummed. “Like I’m fighting a brute nested in the body of an insect.”
“Enough of this shit,” Shiv growled. He slammed his fists together, every blow building up his own Momentum Core. She might be faster, but he could still make this hard for her—make her be on the receiving end of a discharge for once.
But just then, he caught sight of a most spectacular scene—a literal storm of arrows descending from the sky. So many that they were practically raindrops. A flash of fire illuminated the darkness above, and it revealed a strange battle between two dragons and a small army. A small army of Adam's copies. The Young Lord was using Harkness’s rapier. The clones blinked and vanished only as long as it took to fire a single shot. Whatever wounds they took, Adam would take as well, but this was perfect for stalling the dragons.
“Everyone brace!” Adam cried, his mind drowning in stress. “Mind mana arrows! Focus on their minds! It stuns them! They only have one Psychom—ah!” Shiv felt a brutal blow strike Adam, but his Legendary armor kept him alive. “One! One! Psychomancer! I don’t know where the fragment is yet! Shiv! Assistance! I need bloody backup!”
“Your friend?” the kukri-wielding dragon said. Her stance was unbroken, her wings twitched behind her, and the ground turned to solid slabs of ice beneath her feet. “Would you like to go save him?”
Shiv replied by launching a salvo of bone drills at her. She casually parried most of them without ever taking her eyes off him. Her lower claw tapped the blade again.
“There!” Can Hu snarled. “The tell. She is going to strike your back again—expect the dodge.”
“Yeah.”
True to Can Hu’s predictions, the dragon vanished into gold and dodged through Shiv. Then, both the dragon and Shiv surprised each other. Instead of trying to grab or attack the dragon directly, he flung a massive net of skin decoys over her eyes, fastening a blindfold of adamantine-hard skin to steal her sight. And she teleported. A spatial bubble collapsed around them as they were squeezed across a vast distance of space.
Pressed together in that confined space, the tides of battle turned for the first time. Shiv ruptured all his organs and ground his bones to dust to fuel a new Woundeater. He crashed against the blinded dragon before she could respond. Two blasts washed over her, one physical, the other magical. She cried out and dodged, but there was no place for her to rematerialize. The pressure flung her back, and Shiv seized her right arm before hammering his gravitic field upward at her elbow.
The arm clicked. Partial tendon tear, Shiv instinctively knew. But the dragon had Master-Tier Toughness as well, and she unleashed a blast of frost out from her wings. Shiv felt a heavy coldness cling to him, but it was nothing before his Gravitic Wrestler. He shattered the ice block—only for her to dissolve into gold and drive her blade down against his back again.
Rage exploded through Shiv. He poured it into his Momentum Core through his Feat and caught the dragon’s arm before she could continue. “Stop!” He slammed his head into her chest, and she grunted. “Doing!” His Momentum Core was just about to fill. “That!” He discharged, squeezing her back in a tight lock just as he crashed into her. Two of her ribs dislocated. The dragon choked—but then she vanished into gold and stabbed him in the back again, knocking him off balance.
“Godsdammit!” Shiv snarled. He hated this dragon. He hated that knife. He wanted to have that knife. Shiv was going to take that knife from this dragon's felling corpse.
The teleportation bubble burst. He crashed hard into the ground and tried to grind himself to a halt with his gravity field. She crashed behind him with a loud gasp. As Shiv finally came to a halt, he turned to find the dragon gulping down a massive potion before tossing it aside. He sighed. “Great. Perfect. Of course she has a dragon-sized regeneration potion.”
They were in another section of the Umbral Wilderness now. Not far away, a dense thicket of colossal brambles was burning. Around half a dozen Weaveresses lay dead around an unmoving Dragon-Knight, its body pincushioned by hundreds of crossbow bolts. Overhead, arrows continued to rain down as blasts of Psychomancy were followed by psionic wails. Shiv could hear the Jealousy and Uva hissing out in pain as a dragon drove a lance into her, breaking her spell and letting the dragon Psychomancer recover.
Magical arrows rained down from the sky, bombarding the land. Whatever semblance of order or a plan had existed at the start of this battle was dead. The dragons fought in groups of three, teleporting through the air and launching counter-charges against any and all attackers. Their defense was mobile, dynamic. Their flight patterns also intersected each other constantly, and that was only the core group.
There were also assholes like the kukri dragon, who seemed like some kind of independent warrior—or someone that constantly assisted all the other dragons whenever they needed it.
Valor had understated these bastards. Shiv and the others were absolutely not ready for this fight. But this was not a reasonable world. Didn’t matter. Shiv would be a perfectly unreasonable man in return. And he was going to beat the damned bastards anyway.
Shiv's enemy shook out her wounded arm and popped her ribs back into place. Then, she resumed her stance, and her kukri shone brighter than ever. She left his skin decoys for now. A mark on the side of her head seemed to indicate that she was unable to remove them easily and ended up cutting herself.
“Clever choice,” she breathed, tapping the knife to her face. “But how’s the body? Saw some interesting Biomancy earlier. Are you healed?”
Shiv snorted. “Yeah, don’t flatter yourself. That was nothing. You should have seen me when I fought a Jealousy.”
“And you should have seen me when I killed my dragon and took its body,” she sneered. “But are you the opposite? Are you a monster wearing a guise? Raw technique. Animalistic. Instinctual. Primal. Like a dragon pretending to be a man.”
“Nah,” Shiv said, looking up at the sky. “It’s just how a chef fights.”
The dragon paused. “A chef—”
She vanished into gold.
“Behind,” Can Hu declared.
But Shiv was tired of this shit. He launched another spread of skin decoys and wrapped it around her blade. The dragon cried out in surprise as Shiv attached the end of his skin decoys to a full set of adamantine armor and staked it deep underground using his gravitic field and Biomancy. She lurched as her blade hand was pulled into the soil—and Shiv clapped the sides of her head, like 811 did to him days before.
She snarled—and Shiv launched every skin decoy he had left down her throat and expanded them to spread out. The dragon choked. Shiv tried to grab her, but she teleported away.
Striking Proficiency > 31
Frictionless Vector > 53
He grunted and blasted into the air. “Can Hu, keep an eye open for her. I’m going for Adam and Uva.”
“Affirmative,” Can Hu said.
As Shiv approached the aerial battleground, he began to slam his fists together, charging up his Momentum Core. At the same time, he listened to the psionic chatter streaming through Uva’s mind.
“Grey Zone here! We’ve taken too many casualties. We need to pull out! We’re combat-ineffective!”
“Liquid Serpent. I have traded an arm to kill a dragon. I think that means I can kill at least seven more…”
“Still Water. Target got pulled out by a Jump Mage. They’re back in the air. They’re all converging on the Jealousy. Sister Uva—you got more inbound!”
Shiv snarled. He needed to get Adam out of the mess first. Then Uva. “Shiv here! I’m on approach! Adam! Hold on!”
“I’ve been bloody holding on for the past—” Adam’s thoughts broke off as the sky fractured with lightning. A dragon rose above all others, holding a crackling lance aloft. From the lance extended tendrils of magical lightning that spread across the battlefield, striking every dragon, every weapon, even Shiv. He felt a force pull at him, and Shiv cried out as he struggled to resist the pull. It was like he was prying himself out from the hand of a giant, but with an incredible effort, Shiv broke free.
Gravitic Wrestler > 111
The same could not be said for each of Adam’s clones. Shiv watched in horror as every single clone was torn to the sky, drawn to the lance like it was a singularity before they vanished. But Adam's real body remained.
“Magnetism!” Can Hu declared. “And the Dynamancer’s spell is not done. Shiv. Discharge your core now.”
Shiv slammed a final blow against himself and did just that. But he could already hear Adam screaming—not psionically, but literally, even from so far away. An echo of the Young Lord’s pain spilled across the telepathic link, and rage exploded inside Shiv. He offered all of it to his Momentum Core.
“LET GO OF MY ASSHOLE!” Shiv roared.