Strife had always been here. Before I was, Strife waited for me, the ultimate discipline awaiting its ultimate disciple.
You look upon me like I'm some unfathomable entity, some icon of cruelty, an avatar of brutality and bloodshed. That is an incorrect assumption. It is also an act of cognitive self-defense on your part, because you do not wish to conceptualize a world in which you are anything like me, because I have hurt you so, so deeply.
I will not deny this. I will not proclaim my glory in cruelty, or to relish in the wounds I have delivered upon you. These are not the things that give me satisfaction. Perhaps it gives some of my children satisfaction, but they are young in time, and some day they will fully understand that there are waters sweeter than the tears of their adversaries. But that is something that must be acquired through strife, through experience.
And before I was a god, I was merely a creation. Oh yes, oh yes. Do not look at me, so, Ranger. Close your jaw. Come now. Do you think I would have just emerged in the void? Do you think I would have reached such cruel and brutal perfection as a natural entity? No, I would have been more like you. I would have been imperfect and raw in so many ways because evolution is not a sculptor, but a blind man with a knife making cuts to a species just so it can stumble down the path of its continuation.
There was no stumbling with me from the very first day I was created. My makers wanted one thing of me: to hurt, to bleed, to inflict trauma, and when they made me, they gave all they could to ensure I was the perfect instrument toward strife in body and mind and soul.
But they performed too well. They were too good at sculpting, and when they let their hateful breath flow into my body, I grew aware, I learned, and then I went beyond them. I gripped godhood not for them, but for myself..
They were so heartbroken when I killed them, when I took their children and their bearers from them, how could they have been so blind? Turn to me, Ranger, and look upon me. I didn't kill them because it was cruel, though that was part of it, and that event had a hand in making me relish in my dominance.
No, I did it because there was something to be learned there, a lesson for both my creators and myself. They foolishly thought cruelty and bloodshed to be their ally, and I to be their perfect weapon, their perfect slave.
Cruelty, bloodshed, pain? These are just things, Ranger. Strife is just a thing. It happens because we are, and that is the way it is. That way, and not some other way.
Now offer your hand to me. I have such sights to show you.
-The Challenger to Hero-Ranger Morgan Munny
120 (I)
Offer [II]
For Shiv, the transition was instantaneous. One moment, he was in the gate, the next he was lying somewhere underground, packed tight within a mass of corpses. Writhing maggots and the feeling of festering flesh assailed him, and he found himself staring at the face of a dead elf. Her face was crushed and mangled on the right, but more intact on the left. Her pale, green left eye stared on through him, her mouth hanging open in eternal horror.
For a beat, Shiv just stared. Then the stench hit him, dear gods, the stench. It was like pure, distilled death. It crawled up his nostrils, and it nearly made him empty his stomach right then and there. With a flex of his gravitic field, a blast of force detonated off his body. The head that stared at him disintegrated, as did all the other corpses that were stacked over his person. A pocket opened around him. A pocket that misted with blood and decay. Spraying viscera and rotting patches of flesh rained down from above.
As he gathered his bearings, his heart spiked. Shiv spun on his heels, prepared for any adversary, any kind of fight. But as he did, he took in more of his surroundings, and his face contorted in a look of disgust.
"Yeah," Shiv muttered to himself, "of course you'd take me to a place like this."
He was in a cave. Its space was narrow and claustrophobic, but it wasn’t a cave made of stone and lined with soil on the ground. There were faces sticking out of the tunnel of flesh, stitched together and properly cured. Arms dangled down from the ceiling, and some of them had lanterns threaded through the decaying flesh. All around him were expressions of horror frozen in that final death rictus of their lives.
"Follow the light."
The Challenger's voice made the entire cavern shake, and Shiv heeded the god's words. He stared down along the path laid out by the lanterns, and they cast a trail that led toward a narrow crevice. The dancing radiance of candles slipped along the cleft of said crevice, and Shiv expected another area entirely to be waiting for him on the other side.
But though Shiv heard the orc's words, he didn't accept them. He had no intention of staying here or going along in this nightmarish hellpit, so he simply accelerated through a wall of bodies and kept going. As soon as he blasted through a section of the corpse-forged cave, the Challenger laughed, sounding like a grandfather beholding the antics of a small child.
Blood and ruined flesh peeled around Shiv, and he hit a brief stretch of open air before slamming into a hard surface. A sound of bending metal sang out to him, and Shiv felt himself dent what was a surface of reinforced titanium. The alloy beneath him caved some more until he finally pulled himself to a stop, pulsing his field a few more times to stabilize himself in the air.
As he looked down at what he'd just hit, he realized it was the ruined chassis of an automaton. Its body was twice the size of Shiv's, even in his current venom-enhanced form, but it was long dead and had a large hole on the side of its abdomen. A single cyclopean optic stared at Shiv. The reflections from nearby lights made it glisten with momentary brightness before that faded as well.
Behind Shiv, the small mound of bodies he'd emerged from collapsed.
Tearing his focus away from the automaton, he finally noticed that wind was flowing around him. The air was foul and thick with the smell of iron and rot, and as he let his gaze wander across the world, he found himself in a hellscape no better than the pit of death.
The sky was a dark, uncanny thing, overhung by an uninterrupted carpet of clouds that rolled across the horizon like spilled paint the colors of rust and burned corpses.
The landscape was nothing but a rolling expanse of bodies, of broken chassis, of smoldering ruins, and of tarnished treasures. Shiv blinked as he tried to process just where exactly he was. The place was the very embodiment of an apocalypse. There was no life he could see for leagues around, and only the faintest shimmer of vitality layered itself upon this place, an even fainter shimmer than that which painted Integrated Earth.
Bodies ran from horizon to horizon, and Shiv finally realized that he had seen this place once before, in a vision of the Pathbearer he despised the most.
As he remembered the sight of 811 being reborn, he saw that the corpses on the surface were also particularly wounded in a different way than the ones in the cave. Their torsos had been torn open from the inside.
Like something had hatched from them.
Immediately, Shiv turned his Biomancy on himself. He checked his organs. He made sure there was nothing in there with him, and only then did he relax slightly. Shiv wouldn't put it beyond the Challenger to implant a parasite in his body and call that good entertainment as it hatched.
"Good paranoia," the Challenger noted. "I will have to think of that for next time. A novel challenge for a competent Biomancer. But a competent Biomancer you are not, dear Bruiser. Not quite yet.”
"Never call me yours again," Shiv spat. "It's only funny when Uva does it, it's creepy when you say it."
"Oh," the Challenger said, voice high with provocation. "And what will you do if I do proclaim ownership over you, if I do keep referring to you as mine?"
"I suppose I can blow out my ears and then tell you to go fuck yourself."
"You would commit self-harm, just for me?"
"No, asshole. I’d commit self-harm for myself. I just don't want to hear your flapping lips. And knock off the weird possessive shit. I know you’re listening in to my conversations and watching me live. Get your own joke."
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
A very human-like snort came from the Challenger, but he hummed. “I suppose that is an acceptable request. Very well. To business, then.”
Just then, there came a flash right above, and the deafening echo of a thunderclap thereafter. The sky rumbled, and through clouds of pitch blackness, stained red with misted blood, fell a deluge of shapes. The shapes were humanoid and robotic, but there were also broken ruins of once-great structures, of shattered weapons from different ages and places Shiv had never known.
But to Shiv's astonishment, some of the bodies were still moving, still glowing with vitality. And as they fell from the sky, plunging fast, they splashed into the rolling mounds of death and decay, as if raindrops feeding an ocean. Some of them came apart upon impact, turning into bursts of spraying gore.
But Shiv's Vitae highlighted the survivors. They still burned bright, like lingering patches of flame among cooling embers. Their voices sang out then, and Shiv heard the madness in their throats, the growls of bloodthirst, the shouts of a ravenous frenzy. Some of them struck at each other with spell and blade, even on the way down, attacking anything that was near them, unleashing waves of destruction upon the ruined world.
One of the falling shapes landed nearby. It was the body of an automaton. One of its three arms was broken, barely hanging on by wires, and its face was lined with cracked, pulsing optics.
Shiv drew back on his gravitic field, and he slowly glided away from the writhing automaton. The damaged bot reached out for him, lashing out with its remaining limbs. But its movements were too uncontrolled. It flung itself over and landed on its chest. And then Shiv sensed a lifeform within the automaton’s body. A life form slamming itself against the inner machinery of the bot as it tried to escape.
The automaton’s metal chassis dented outward, bending unnaturally and violently. And then it stopped. The automaton went still beside the shaking of its body. Sparks burst out from between its joints. But as its life sputtered out, something slammed itself against the insides of the bot again and again.
The dents grew larger, more severe, until finally, the metal comprising the automaton tore open, and large, gray fingers reached out from the inside. There came a deafening bellow, a roar of effort as a large creature hatched free from the automaton.
Its gray-skinned body was unblemished, smooth like that of a child, but its face was that of a cruel purpose, full of wonder and awe at the pain it knew it could inflict.
Its eyes were bright yellow, and as its head rose free from the broken automaton's body, its gaze fell upon Shiv. The orc’s face twitched for a moment, as if it wasn't sure how to control its muscles, but slowly, a wide, genial smile spread across its features. As the orc’s jowls tightened and his lips flared, Shiv could see all the pointed teeth gleaming inside the gray brute’s mouth. The orc was smaller than the others, fresher, less marred, but it was an orc still, and it was an orc in every single way.
Another rumble came from above. More bodies fell and struck the ground. Countless flickering beacons of vitality blinked out upon impact, but some endured. Some endured until they winked out too moments later, replaced by other flames emerging from within them.
More orcs rose across the horizon. They ripped free from the bodies and ruins, death serving as the cocoon to their metamorphosis. And they let out bellows, cries, bestial shouts, announcing their birth from the ruined husks of people that were.
"Behold," the Challenger proclaimed. "Behold, the fate that would have befallen you, had you let my skill consume you entirely of mind and soul. I would have claimed you upon your final end. For you would have been mine to claim, touched of my essence and power.”
Shiv grimaced as he flew across the sky, dodging falling corpses and debris. "This is what would have happened to me if I didn’t fuse Culinary Berserker?"
“It is only proper,” the Challenger said. “To take on a skill of my design, an Orcish Skill meant to honor your willingness to battle and break while testing your fortitude of spirit, is a challenge, after all. Should you fail, the process of losing your very being to me, like these poor victims, is but preliminary.”
“Yeah, it sounds to me you’re just spitting bullshit to justify all of this.”
“Hm. No. There is no justification required. They failed to defy me like you did. So I colonized their very existences. I do nothing greater or lesser than what the natural inclinations of nation-states and dimensions lead them to do. To prey upon others is our writ of existence, and to be preyed upon is our eulogy of demise.”
“And what fancy words are you going to use to explain just shoving me in a pit filled with corpses?”
“Amusement.”
“Fuck you.”
A loud chuckle came from the Challenger, and though unseen, the orc god’s breath was felt like a hurricane brushing across the world. The small orc near Shiv launched himself into the air, reaching for the Deathless, teeth bared to sample the large human’s flesh. But the winds unleashed by the Challenger grasped the newborn orc and flung him far into the distance. The sudden spike in acceleration snapped the orc’s arms and legs. Yet, rather than screaming out in pain, he laughed.
In the orc’s wide, yellow eyes, Shiv saw the beast's unparalleled pleasure in simply being alive, and an insatiable urge to strive and slay.
As Shiv watched the orc get carried away, the Challenger continued his speech. "All who are swallowed of soul by my Orcish Skills are bound to me, and their souls are given unto me as their mortal bodies die, as an incubator of metamorphosis, an anvil for my warrior breed to be forged.”
"So your orcs are just, what, parasites?" Shiv asked.
"Parasites?" the Challenger echoed, sounding almost offended. “No more than you are for growing strong from your struggles. And no more than you would have been, had you walked the Path offered to you by your father.”
“My father didn’t offer me a Path,” Shiv said, clenching his teeth in confusion. He balled his fists as he looked up into the sky. “My father was a sick, twisted felling shit who murdered—”
“Oh, listen and think, boy,” the Challenger interrupted, sounding frustrated for the first time. “Your reactive anger makes you stupid. I speak not of the man who sprayed his seed in your birther. I speak of the chef.”
“Georges?” Shiv blinked. The anger in him broke, replaced by discomfort. “He… he isn’t my father.”
“Is he not? Did he not ensure you had a place to eat? To sleep? To work?”
“I… Yeah, but—”
“Did he not teach you many things that allowed you to survive? Risk himself by taking you in? Shape your personality by the heat of the stove and the edge of the knife?”
Shiv was silent by this point.
“He is your father in most regards. And you would have borne something of his if you had taken the Path of the Chef. A pity. I almost wish to know what you might be like if you devoted yourself entirely to this passion. But in all honesty, in that world, I would hold little interest in you, Deathless.”
Shiv frowned at the shrinking form of the newborn orc, then shook his head to clear his wandering thoughts. “So. Your orcs hatch from these consumed Pathbearers… and they have the Pathbearer’s Paths?”
“Correct. You have little understanding of a soul’s shape, and so you have little understanding of how difficult it is to ensure one has an oriented fate, so to speak, that their existences are structured toward a specific set of experiences, to embody a very particular kind of legend. After all, it is not so easy for a Slave to be a great warrior, or for a Chef to be a Master-Tier Mage.”
Shiv was getting tired of the Challenger’s constant prattling. “Right. Cool. Great. Glad you like to talk. Now, how about you tell me what this offer is so you can send me back before I see if I can tear a hole open in your realm with my Vitaemancy. I put a few holes in reality earlier. Didn’t like doing that back on Earth, but right here, right now, I don’t think I much give a shit.” Shiv let his Vitae streams swirl around his body for a moment, but the Challenger remained unimpressed.
"Your patience needs work," the Challenger said casually. "It is not a good thing to rush through your struggles. You lose the nutrition that way. Chefs are supposed to care about nutrition, no?"
"Wouldn't call any of this shit nutritional," Shiv replied.
“Oh, but it is. This is your great limitation right now. And I cannot entirely fault you for it, because the System seems intent on rushing you, on forcing you to be raw and undercooked." The Challenger picked his words carefully, and slowly Shiv stopped clenching his fists. Shiv knew the orc god was using some kind of Social Skill on him, but it didn’t feel overly invasive. It just made Shiv want to listen.
"But despite the System's ways, despite its constant urge to see you finished, or to spur you to greater heights of conflict, you must be your own master. You must snatch from the System, and from life, every opportunity you can to sample new experiences, to take in new knowledge. And furthermore, there is no need for threats. You are not afraid of me, because that is what you are, a vicious creature, a warrior down to the bone, a bruiser. You will swing your fist at me, even if there is no hope for victory, no chance of prevailing greater than that of reaching up with your fingers and plucking a star from the night sky. And you will do so again and again, and I will batter you again and again, until, perhaps in your mind, you imagine your skills will finally outstrip my capacity, that you will grow strong enough to challenge a true god."
"I will," Shiv said. There wasn't any doubt in his voice at all. Someday… Someday, he was going to have it out with the Challenger. Someday, he was going to know how to kill a god.
And maybe I can do it with my Vitae. Pull him apart at the foundations and render him nothing at all…
"Someday, perhaps," the Challenger mused, "but not today. Today is a day when I make a few things clear to you, so that you understand what I can provide. But before that, I wish for you to have understanding. Not of me, but of yourself. It is improper to treat everything as a struggle and a fight, after all."
The Challenger's last words were so unexpected that they gave Shiv whiplash. "Excuse me? Did you really just say that? Did I hear you right?"
"I am a god of strife and bloodshed," the Challenger proclaimed. "I am not a caricature of strife and bloodshed. I know very well what happens when one is utterly consumed, when one is dominated by the concepts that they interface with so much. You can see them now."
And Shiv did see them.
He saw the maddened Pathbearers writhing on the ground, their limbs madly clawing out, their skills blasting chunks out of the land—chunks made of corpses of other fallen Pathbearers.