The System can move in both subtle and vulgar ways. But when it gets vulgar, it gets very, very vulgar.
I'll say something right now, something that most Pathbearers don't like to admit out loud. Call it superstition, call it self-preservation; they just don't like mentioning it. But most of us? Well, we think the System's a piece of shit.
Sure, it gives us power, and that's great. There's nothing like being a Pathbearer, performing an action over and over, pushing yourself, and going beyond everything you were before. But the System only gives you that power so it can throw you at something else. It just wants to see you struggle and, eventually, die. The System is a goddamn conflict generator. No, a conflict eater.
Hey, I've got a personal theory. It came to me one day as I marched on a battlefield, right as a mana storm emerged from nowhere. You want to know why I think it appeared? Because we had just smashed our enemy, taken barely any losses, and the System wasn't satisfied. So it sent a storm after us.
We hunkered down, and inside that storm were primal dragons.
You ever fight a dragon, Reader? If you have, then you understand what I'm talking about. There's no monster quite like a dragon. You can launch all the magic you want at the damn monsters; it'll only make it stronger. It'll drink up a good portion of it and smash right into you. You need to gather your entire mage corps just to really affect one normally, and if they smash into your backline, you’ll see what mass death is.
I barely managed to wrestle one down long enough for my wife to take its head off.
We didn't do anything to start that fight. We didn't go anywhere near the mana storm. It hunted us! It followed us! An army a million strong, and those goddamn dragons killed 200,000 of us. We killed maybe 150 of them in return, and then the storm just passed through.
And in the end, the only reason we got out of that was because we had a Heroic-Tier Chronomancer with us, blinking around the battlefield, drawing the bulk of the dragons’ attentions away.
At the end of it all, I gained my sixth Master-Tier skill. We hadn't even gotten a Quest for that. It was just a random slaughter that happened without reason.
That was when I learned to truly hate the System.
Then, a month later, my wife lay bleeding to death in my arms. And that new skill I got? The "Seal Wound" skill I had failed to use to save my friends? I used it on her, and she lived.
And I wasn't so hateful of the System anymore.
But I am terrified of it. And I am scared of what it might do to me next.
-Memoirs of a Master-Tier War Mage
85 (I)
Chronomancer
As Shiv selected a skill without thought, his insides boiled. He boiled with rage at the System's hand, which had deliberately pushed him to this place. He boiled with rage at the eldritch entity, which was extending the oily tendrils that now composed Confriga's wings toward Adam, Uva, and Valor.
Come on! Shiv roared silently. Come on!
"Adam… No, no, no, please," Rose moaned within him, reaching out for her son from leagues beyond his reach.
The entity had a protective veil of Chronomancy that displaced Shiv every time he got close. He never stopped trying to consume the entity’s vitality. With his Chronomancy manifesting as a feeble layer of golden grains over his body, however, all he managed was pushing a bit further into the entity’s shroud before he was launched back in time.
Yet, as his Skill Evolution took hold, things became different. Shiv observed the entire process of his displacement. It wasn't as sudden or jarring as before. Instead, he felt himself snap two seconds backward. A heavy current of unseen Chronomancy mana smashed into him, driving him away with ease.
That’s why I couldn’t hurt it earlier! Godsdamned Chronomancy! It could have kept me at bay like this forever if I hadn’t gained my own Chronomancy Skill. Come on! Evolve! Hurry up!
The first of its oily tendrils snaked around Adam's armor, seizing the Young Lord as he struggled in vain.
"G-get back you—tainted thing!" Adam spat, his voice thick with absolute dread. Still, he glared at the entity with all the hate and defiance he could muster. If there was one thing about Adam, it was that he was going to do the right thing. He was going to be a Pathbearer, even if it scared him to death.
Uva, meanwhile, went entirely cold. She said nothing, simply scowling at the beast with disdain as its limbs projected toward her. The only one more unresponsive was Valor; the ancient Pathbearer seemed resigned.
"Shiv," Valor called out, "this is not your fault. This is what it means to be favored. Whatever happens, do not cling to it. Let the pain pass through you—”
Shiv ignored Valor. The System gave him a skill, and he was going to be godsdamned if he was going to let this monster take his companions from him.
Skill Evolution: Chronomancy (Adept) > Strider of the Unbending Path (Master)
Shiv felt something burst out from within his Vitae, blossoming outward to cover him as if a flower in bloom. A second before, his Chronomancy was but a thin trickle of motes over his body, so faint he could barely feel it. Like Necromancy, its mana seemed to work differently from his Biomancy, shrouding him tightly rather than projecting itself outward as a field. As soon as his Skill Evolution completed, his Chronomancy transformed. And his relationship with time itself changed as well.
The thin film ignited and swelled with potency, with the glittering, golden dust melded together into fluid and resplendent armor. The massive spike in power flooded Shiv with a rush unlike any he had ever experienced. More than that, existence quivered around him, and his senses felt something entirely new.
All his life, he had known the world as something material, something to interact with using his body or, more recently, his magic. Now, the world had another sensation to it. It wasn't visible, but it was something he could feel. There was a flow to the world, to time. Time was constantly passing, constantly pushing him toward the future, an ever-present pressure gliding him along like a current in a river. Previously, he had been so submerged in it that he was ignorant, drowned. But as his Chronomancy shot to Master-Tier, it was like he had suddenly developed fins and gills. He had surfaced. He could feel the exact sensation of time passing against him, concentrating around him.
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The gold that shrouded him, the mana of Chronomancy itself, was no longer a thin film. It was more than just an outer shell as well, but something akin to a second layer to his very being. The flowing currents that comprised the Strider of the Unbending Path imbued him with the power to defy the passing of time and press forward.
Forward into the time-inverting waves unleashed by the entity.
Just then, Adam cried out. He pulled his head back as one of the entity’s tentacles shot upward through his chin, splitting the Young Lord’s lower jaw in half. Blood welled. Adam screamed. Rose howled out for him. Shiv’s heart exploded into a firestorm of rage.
In that desperate moment, Shiv defied the passage of time itself. The act was purely reflexive. He directed the flow of his temporal shell against the path which time crossed. The effect was immediate. The fluid gold armor solidified against the rushing currents of the fleeting present. A building pressure slammed into Shiv—an intense and immense weight. But Shiv defied the will of time as his armor trembled and lashed against the progress of history. He fed every last bit of his rage into his Chronomancy, and, for a moment, the struggle lessened.
Time ground to a near halt. Everyone froze.
Everyone but Shiv.
A coldness radiated through him as more of his vitality slipped away, but in that frozen instant, Shiv couldn’t help but regard his new magical power with awe and wonder. With every passing second, a strain was building against him. Time was ever-moving, and the weight it directed against him was always climbing. He wouldn't be able to sustain the growing pressure pushing against him for long, but for that moment, Shiv was a new kind of pillar—a dam against time.
Shiv moved, and it felt like he was sprinting underwater. Even with his immense strength, it felt like battling his way against a raging rapid with every step toward the entity. But he could still move! As he stomped toward the entity, he flinched as his newly evolved Chronomancy revealed something else to him.
The entity had vast, golden rivers connected to its body. Within those rivers floated faint echoes of the entity itself, but from a previous instance in time. Each of the echoes was neatly and evenly spaced, and Shiv guessed that it represented a separation of a single second in time. He remembered the creature talking about how it had another past. This was likely why. It had several pathways of Chronomancy extending into the near past. He also noted a building, golden accretion layering the space around the original entity itself. Somehow, he could instinctively tell that something to do with the future. The way this entity existed was discordant with reality, and time made its displeasure known against it as well, albeit to no avail.
Near the entity’s true body, the rivers curved and became something of a spiral. Even with Shiv holding his own passage in time still, he could see the entity’s curving rivers still moving slowly. They also seemed to be leaking fractals out into reality.
Steeling himself, Shiv managed his final few steps and smashed through the inner layer of Chronomancy mana that enshrouded the entity as if a bubble. The entity’s protective Chronomancy deformed. Shiv speared his palm on the entity’s lower back. Vitality exploded through him. The only time he felt more vitality flood into him at once was when he was facing the formless god while fighting the Educator.
Vitality Drain > 46
Revenant > 40
“What is this?!” the entity cried. Shiv nearly flinched away in surprise, but he held firm. Its voice wailed forth from every river connected to it. And to Shiv’s surprise, every last echo within those rivers turned and noticed him. “Hm? Hidden Chronomancer? How? From where? Couldn’t sense you. But… I sense everything?”
Shiv cast a laceration into the entity just as his shadowy cocoon started to form. To his delight, the entity split in half as his Woundeater dove into its body. He cast several more laceration spells and one Bowel-Breaker for good measure. The entity came apart. The hand and fingers that formed its face turned into chunks of oily-black ichor. Its “blood” slithered out of existence even as it peeled apart before Shiv’s temporal onslaught.
Strider of the Unbending Path > 101
Woundeater > 76
Yet, before he ever could rejoice, a section of the entity’s river crashed into it, superimposing one of its echoes over its recently butchered body. That river got noticeably shorter; it sacrificed an entire section of itself to perform the act Shiv just witnessed. But the entity was alive again. And it was aware of what just happened. Aware because it could view Shiv’s frozen present from a few seconds in the past.
What the hells am I fighting? Shiv shuddered. No wonder entire chunks of time were missing from his recollection earlier. This thing was probably attacking him from a place he just couldn’t defend. But how? Valor said that changing history itself was impossible without severe consequences and a ludicrous amount of mana. Was he fighting another god? Was the local mana stability about to collapse? It seemed fine. Everything about the damned entity was unnatural. Of course, that’s not going to stop me from kicking your ass.
Shiv’s resurrective cocoon burst around him. The Deathless snarled as he drove the hardest uppercut he could against the entity. A blast of force exploded around the damned hand it had for a face. Frozen in time against Shiv’s Strider, it couldn’t move. Shiv was about to hit it again when a crack formed over his Strider. The golden shell was on the verge of shattering beneath history’s building mass. Shiv knew he couldn’t endure much longer.
Ten seconds, Shiv recalled with a silent groan. I can practically stop my personal passage of time for ten seconds. But no more than that. Gods, it feels like I’m about to break apart.
But he couldn’t just drop his Chronomancy right now. It was the only thing protecting him from the entity’s abilities. And Adam was going to die if he let time resume. The entity was going to drive its tentacle up through the Young Lord’s skull. Out of time and options, Shiv cast a final spell at the tentacle as he reduced his struggle against time. Reduced; he didn’t stop.
The effects were absolute and astonishing. The world around him jerked back into motion. Slow motion. Shiv’s Strider was still cracking apart, but not nearly as fast as it did when he held time back from moving him at all. The entity reacted as well—and it was far faster than he was without a full Momentum Core.
It slammed his Chronomancy against him, smashing its rivers into his body. As it's unnatural time magic colliding against him, more of Shiv’s golden shell burst apart, revealing the Deathless within. But he stood his ground. He remained a dam, a pillar against time itself. The world wasn’t going to make him bend. And neither was this godsdamned abomination.
“Move!” the entity commanded. Every one of its echoes howled the command thereafter. Several of the echoes flicked their foul tentacles into Shiv, and cuts opened across his body beneath the entity’s discordant touch. The Strider didn’t protect one from physical damage. But it kept Shiv pinned to the present, even as it broke away bit by bit. And his Adamantine Adaption diminished each of the entity’s following blows.
“Away! I cast you away! Back into my past!” it cried again. “You will move—” Shiv’s shifted out of context. The creature froze. Every single one of its echoes stared on at the space where Shiv once existed. Beyond causality, Shiv flared his gravitic field and blasted up into the air, carrying the entity high. His Vitae exploded around him on impact, and the entity let out a sanity-rending howl. But its focus was broken. The rivers of time connected to it splashed about wildly in the same fashion as its tentacles.
“And you can eat shit!” Shiv roared as he punted the entity in the chest with all his strength. He hit it so hard his right shin was completely fractured. A five-hundred meter wide shockwave tore through the air as his gravitic field sent the entity shooting into the distance like a pebble, its tentacles and rivers of Chronomancy mana trailing behind it.
Adamantine Adaption > 128
Gravitic Wrestler > 126
Striking Proficiency > 39
As soon as the entity was more than a kilometer away, Shiv spiked himself back down to the ground. He fed his fracture to a wyrm as he crashed down beside Adam and ripped the tentacle out from the Young Lord’s face. Adam’s lower jaw was a mutilated mess. One that immediately went away as Shiv cast a Woundeater into him as well.
“Come on,” Shiv said, reaching down and pulling Adam to his feet. “You’re alright! You’re going to be alright!”