69 (II)
Distraction
With a pull of his gravitic field, Shiv growled and ripped out the square he carved into the building. The square grid came free easily, dust and bits of debris shooting outward with a gust of wind. As he pulled the plot out, he found someone blinking at him in surprise on the other side, sitting on—Shiv frowned at the stunned Vulteg. There was a tube connected to their lower body, and they were… and was it some kind of toilet? Shiv shook his head. The Vulteg squinted its single eye as it tried to figure out what just happened. Slowly, they noticed Shiv’s outline, and their vertical jaw opened wide. “What—”
Shiv slammed into them, utterly dissolving them into bloody paste. A moment later, Shiv pulled the square grid he cut into the building back in place and then welded it shut using his blade's Conduit of Dawn Enchantment in small bursts.
Shiv laughed in impish delight, and Can Hu chuckled alongside him.
“I suspect this will buy us a few moments,” Can Hu said.
“Just a few?” Shiv asked.
“How long until your next kill?” Can Hu asked rhetorically.
“Ah, shit, you’re right.”
"Adam,” Shiv said, speaking across Uva's mind-strands, “you were right. Stealth was a good skill to evolve."
"Of course I was right,” Adam said. “Glad you're having fun, though."
"How're things on your side?” Shiv asked. He was walking carefully down a winding hallway now. He decided that he would take a limited and temporary, subtle approach for as long as he could to improve his Silhouette Skill. This Adept-Tier Skill was an incredible force multiplier when used in tandem with his Master-Tier Skills. It took a pretty high level of Awareness to even notice he was there, and with him only being an outline, even perceptive enemies often lost track of him in the chaos of combat.
“I fired another arrow the moment you left. We managed to get across the gate without being noticed at all.” Adam briefly paused, and Shiv felt him fire an arrow at someone. “Your end, however, is swarming with Jump Mages and dimensionals. They’re still at the plaza and trying to control the airspace—they don’t know you’re at the obsidian tower yet. Also, about Confriga. Apparently, he's an Adept Necromancer. Actually, Valor insists on calling him ‘barely Adept-Tier.’”
Shiv chuckled. Valor seemed very defensive about the art.
Just then, a small group of heavily armed Vultegs rounded the corner. They didn't quite see Shiv due to his Silhouette, and the first of them ran into him. That one got cut in half. Her blood was promptly flung into the other Vultegs’ eyes, who then became doubly unprepared for the ripping and tearing that followed.
Silhouette > 55
Deepest Edge > 58
Two of them were Master-Tier, and one of them had a high-leveled Master-Tier Toughness—so hard Shiv’s blade bounced off at an odd angle. Unfortunately for them, Shiv noted they were also likely a Master-Tier Hydromancer, and he did his old trick against mages again: He cut the straps of their armor and then discovered they had no Magical Resistance otherwise. That Master-Tier’s heart stopped, and they died with an intact body.
It was good to have multiple angles of attack.
Woundeater > 67
The insides of this descending tower were luxurious; gold layered the walls, and red plush carpets extended everywhere, mapping the floor and blending with the pooling blood. Above, gems glittered, glowing bright, a bit too bright for Shiv’s liking. His Biomancy spread far, and he could sense a dense concentration of life forms all across the building. He decided to go to the most concentrated area of people just to see what might be there.
If it was nothing but a legion of Vulteg guards, Shiv would tear them apart and save himself the later trouble.
At this point, he risked his stealth a little as he brought his hands together, crashing his fists hard. The walls cracked, the building shook slightly, and part of the interior crumbled and collapsed from the shockwaves rippling out of the Deathless. Before Shiv could fully fill his core, he stopped, pointed his gravity field downward, crashed through two floors, and broke contact again before another group teleported to where he was. He could feel tugs of pressure coming from all directions. Pathbearers were teleporting into the tower. They were zeroing in on him again, but they still didn’t know where he was.
And then he heard something. "Get him! Find him! Find him! Or I will take your hands! I will use you as effigies! Find him!"
Confriga was raging. Can Hu laughed. Shiv laughed too.
"And this is the Great Lord," the automaton said. It gave a mechanical sigh. "He reminds me of my first pilot, Henry."
"They were that bad?" Shiv asked.
"They were worse than you could possibly imagine," Can Hu said. "They also were a child sent off to war, a child taught to love war, a child connected to me by tubes, by wires, and by chemicals. Every time I killed, every time they directed me to pull a trigger, they felt pleasure."
Shiv shuddered at that. "What the hell kind of culture would do that thing to a kid?"
"One that hates what happened to the world, and one that would do anything to bring things back to a time before the System."
Shiv gave an indifferent grunt. "Sounds like they need to just deal with what happened. Rest of us are still here, still fighting.”
"If it were only so easy," Can Hu replied.
Shiv pushed his way through walls and cleaved gaps down the floors. His Silhouette kept anyone from noticing him as he moved quickly. His Momentum Core was almost filled, so he was practically just below the sound barrier anyway, even at normal speeds. As he drew close to the dense concentration of people, Shiv crashed through a wall—and he immediately froze himself in mid-air. His eyes widened slightly
Inside a vast chamber, he found not Vulteg guards, but a processing plant for humans, elves, Umbrals, and goblins.
They were hanging upside down from hooks, and none of them wore any clothes. There were strange surgical scars on their bodies, and there were mechanical belts on the ceiling, moving them along. Shiv remembered seeing something like this once; a picture in a book he got to read in his old orphanage about slaughterhouses across the Republic.
Except this wasn't for animals. These were people.
"What the hells are they doing here?" Shiv muttered.
"I do not know," Can Hu replied, sounding confused. More than that, the automaton was even more appalled than he was. “The Vulteg are not known to partake in the consumption of humans or other sentient species. These people… Many of them seem to still be alive. Can you help them?"
Shiv reached into one of the nearest people using his Biomancy, and what he discovered left him even more disgusted. "There's something inside of them. What are they doing to these people?" Shiv cast a Biomancy spell and reached in. He pulled slowly, trying to extract the creature without harming the person. It was small enough that he managed to drag it out through their mouth. The person groaned as the creature slipped out from them. And as it shot towards Shiv, as he caught it in his hand, he gave a hiss of disbelief.
"Uva, you are not going to like this." Shiv stared down at a clutch of eggs that were transparent and showed small, unhatched spider-wasps on the inside. These were weaver eggs. This was a felling weaver breeding facility.
"By the Composer," Uva hissed. "How—how do they have these eggs? And why? Why are they breeding them?"
Shiv looked at the many bodies, and he clenched his jaw. "I've got an idea. Compact. They're dealers, dealmakers, and salespeople, right?"
"Right," Uva replied.
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"Well, since they're willing to sell to anyone, a weaver or a Weaveress unassociated with the Composer is worth good money, especially for someone like Aviary.”
“New Albion has had a hard time replacing weavers and Weaveresses with agents,” Uva muttered. As she thought about it, her anger burned colder and colder. He shuddered at how low the temperature of her mind got. "We cannot allow this to be, Shiv. This place must be destroyed, and these eggs must be extracted with utmost priority as soon as we have secured the gateways.”
"I'll keep this place marked in my mind—best that we try to save everyone here if we can, instead of just butchering them," Shiv said. "Can Hu—”
“I already have it registered. We will be able to find our way back next time. For now, I recommend you best cover your tracks and move somewhere else. More threats are coming. I feel a tremoring two floors above with my Geomancy. Someone is closing rapidly."
Shiv grunted and left the room as quickly as he could without causing environmental damage. Instead of smashing through a wall, he cut another gap through the floor and dropped through. He slipped the slab back into place just as he heard a loud bang from above.
"Where?" he heard Confriga roar. "Where are you going? Where?"
Shiv barely held back a laugh. He also barely held back from blasting up into the room and trying to finish things with a Gate Lord right there and then. "Don't risk it, Shiv," he said to himself.
He had an itch for violence. It was almost like the itch he felt with the Orcish Skill, but he kept himself composed for now, focused on what he needed to do. Inside his chest, his Momentum Core thundered on the verge of discharge, but he wouldn't use it. Not unless he absolutely had to. He just needed to stay as fast as he could. He shot down the halls, moving as little more than a transparent outline.
Several more groups sweeping the tower encountered him. Several more groups were then promptly used to redecorate the walls. As he cut them, he focused on the wounds he inflicted using his Biomancy. He focused and multitasked. He studied biology as he inflicted pain. He was, after all, instructed to learn in practice by Dven. As such, when he turned down another hall, he briefly managed to compose a crystallization of a deep laceration. But then its structure collapsed, and Shiv cried out as he opened the very wound on his body.
He laughed, though. He laughed as his practical knowledge of biology climbed up, and his Woundeater as well. Shiv discovered something: how to instantly create a laceration without inflicting it on himself first.
Practical Metabiology > 25
Woundeater > 68
Nice, Shiv thought. Ignoring the wound lining his body, he recreated the laceration again with a bit more effort. It crystallized, and this time he directed the spell pattern outward, attuning the shape carefully. Shiv didn't exactly have an academy education when it came to spell shaping, but spells were ultimately directed by intent and created when one’s mana field reshaped itself in a certain way to impose magic on reality. That was why most of Shiv's spells were unleashed in the form of a Woundeater now, and that's why Uva's Psychomancy took the shape of strands.
"Oh, this is useful," Shiv said as he focused on the laceration. And then he began to experiment with it. He cut through another group and made the laceration larger, more severe, deeper. He also learned how to focus it on specific body parts, mainly by injuring himself repeatedly, until it clicked.
The beautiful thing about magic was how it interfaced with the world. Everything was connected, and with enough focus and study for his Biomancy, he could get there. He could understand the finest detail of things. Valor told him not to neglect his mind. Well, this was his mind at work. If he treated everything like he treated cooking, attended to every detail, zeroed in on every bit of information until it was sealed tight in his mind… Well, who knew what he might become. And another benefit to learning about lacerations? It made his spellcasting even quicker. No need to harvest any wounds meant that he could directly launch a wyrm instead of having it feed on him first.
As soon as another group came, Shiv launched wyrm after wyrm, expanding every laceration as much as he could. It struck the mercenary Pathbearers, and two of them fell apart in an instant. A third detonated with crimson mana before another wyrm crashed into them and split them from head to groin. As they came apart, three more wyrms crashed into the last member of the group, but their Magical Resistance was tremendous.
Comparatively, their Toughness left much to be desired. Shiv drove his blade through them, blood exploded out their back, and then Shiv crushed their head and folded their neck off to the side just to be sure. He chucked the body behind him, glad about his progress. "Well," Shiv said, "this is enjoyable. It's even meditative.”
“You were casting that spell at an impressively fast rate,” Can Hu noted. “Almost down to a quarter second for each spell.”
Practical Metabiology > 26
“No need to feed it anything,” Shiv said. “That makes it faster by a lot. I just know how it’s shaped—and how it relates to the body. It’s getting to be second nature. Just have to treat more of these injuries like they’re recipes. Dven was right—this was a good idea.”
He heard another rumble as Confriga descended just around the corner behind him. "Well, time to go again." Shiv cut the ground open and dropped through. He slid the grid back in place at the last moment as he felt the Gate Lord approach. Confriga was a constant presence in the back of his mind—he felt the Lesser Marshal’s Magical Resistance. Confriga was practically a piece of iron in a world made from wood and glass.
"I can feel you," Confriga hissed. "I know that you're close."
Shiv considered using his Momentum Core to escape just then. But to his right came a sound; a loud ding. Shiv turned, and he walked over as the door to an elevator slipped open. Inside, a tall Vulteg flanked by a metallic dimensional and a human man froze at the sight of a moving outline approaching them. He swiped his knife through all three of them, and the top halves of their bodies crumpled in half. Shiv got aboard the elevator, and he stared at a button.
He stared at a particularly large button below all the others. Shiv hummed. “Why not—wait.” He stabbed the dead Vulteg again and chucked the corpse out of the elevator, making a new chrono-anchor. Then, he got back in and hit the button just out of plain curiosity. Since he'd just seen a human mercenary exit the elevator and there were no special requirements to pressing the button, he wasn't worried about it leading straight to Vulketh. As he descended, he listened to a strange set of noises coming from a corner of the elevator that sounded like Vultegs singing with their throats. Shiv blinked and decided that it was strange, but that he kind of liked it.
As the elevator doors opened again, Shiv found himself standing in a wide, open chamber that lacked any furniture or decoration. The surrounding walls were little more than panels of rounded glass overlooking the molten rivers. And he was so close to the bottom of the dimension that he guessed there was less than 20 meters between him and the rushing rivers below right now. At the center of the room was a dense, adamantine pillar that extended beyond the floor. Shiv guessed that that was the elevator leading to the Vulteg dimension.
However, it was locked tight, and all he saw was a small slot on its side, with no other controls beside. As Shiv looked around, he frowned as his Foreshadowing activated.
Foreshadowing: Gate Lord Confriga was arrogant, but he was no fool. He knew that the Republic wasn't trustworthy and that he needed to make sure their incompetence, especially the incompetence of that Master-Advisor, didn't get in the way of the weapon’s delivery. As such, he left it planted in his personal elevator, primed to descend into his home dimension should its walls be compromised.
If it crossed over without him, he would remain unshamed, and he could simply bring it back at any point, averting the danger. What's more, the elevator was made out of adamantine, meaning that nothing short of a true Legend could probably pry it free quickly and escape with it. And since the Gate Lord had his eye on true Legends, he was sure none were coming to Theborn to ruin his days.
Foreshadowing > 27
The vision ended, and Shiv grunted.
Just then, Uva's tendril pulled at his mind. "Shiv," she said. She felt faint, like she was barely holding on to him. "We have reconvened with your contact. Guardshead Leu, is it? I managed to reach her, and she's currently hosting us within her personal quarters."
"That's good," Shiv replied. "I found the Animancy Core."
"You did?" Adam said, sounding surprised. "Well, can you extract it?"
Shiv shook his head. "No, it's a little bit more complicated than that. Confriga’s a real bastard, but he's also a cautious bastard. The core is locked in his personal elevator, the one leading into his home dimension. If I try to do anything, it'll probably move it across immediately, and the elevator is made of solid adamantine. I can't really force my way in easily. I don't think anyone can access it unless their name is Confriga.”
Shiv stared at the slot in the elevator. It looked large enough to fit a skull or something of that size.
"You've done enough for now," Uva said. "They are in disarray. The entire gate is on internal lockdown. Ikki just told me about how things were on the outside through the brooch. They finally managed to calm things down, but not until a good 20% of their forces were decimated. A few of their remaining Masters have banded together and enforced discipline, but things are as chaotic on the outside as they are on the inside. A full curfew has been issued again. The mana core in the sky is unleashing waves of intense coldness all throughout the dimension. I suspect anyone beneath Master-Tier Toughness or lacking some kind of Magical Resistance would be instantly frozen."
Shiv grunted. "Yeah, that sounds pretty draconic, but hey, I guess I'm flattered."
He felt Uva start reaching into him, and just then he heard a crash as something slammed into the elevator he just came from.
"Uva?" Shiv said. “Think Confriga’s about to have a little face-to-face with me. Not that I personally mind, but you should probably get me out.”
"I almost have you," she replied. Shiv trusted her, but he turned, and he gripped his blade, facing the impending threat.
“Vermin!” Confriga shouted as he tore his way down into the elevator shaft and exploded through the doors. As he came to a stop, he just barely noticed Shiv, and then he snarled—his pitch-black eye dilating. Necromancy flared across his chest, and his massive, thin blade shot down to hover beside him.
Shiv grinned as he deactivated his Silhouette for a moment. “Hey, asshole. Was wondering when you would catch up.”
“You!” Confriga launched a whip of Necromantic power. Shiv responded by triggering his Chrono-Anchored Strike. The whip slashed against the adamantine elevator just as Shiv blinked across time. He materialized with a stab. The body of the dead Vulteg jerked, and two teams of Pathbearers flinched back in surprise as Shiv unleashed wyrm and blade upon them. Bodies fell apart. Shiv activated his Silhouette and partially vanished as spells were returned. Then, as he was cutting a short automaton in half, Uva pulled him across the district.
Just in time, too, as for what felt like the thousandth time that day, Confriga blasted out from the walls just a second behind Shiv, and the Gate Lord found himself staring at the bodies of his men, but no Aviary agent.
“NOOOOOO!” the Gate Lord roared, and from the mana core, his cry of rage echoed across the dimension. “COOWWWARRDD!”