338 (II) Stolen Flesh
338 (II)
Stolen Flesh
Longinus spat Valor's name like one would describe a rat infestation they just couldn't get rid of. “A fucking Undying, here of all places. Let me guess: You betrayed the Republic to the Necrotechs, didn’t you? That’s probably how you hurt Daughter—the stupid creature overreached, and you carved her up with your Necromancy.”
Shiv wasn’t here to talk. He spilled out of his Vitae decoy as he went Non-Sequitur and dove for Longinus without hesitation. While the god spoke, Shiv manifested his Revenant in full. His body glowed red with Vitae and white with the blade at his core. The skin of vitality protecting Integration was carved wide open. Life force flooded into Shiv. Warmth poured down and replaced what was lost. His damaged skill began to mend, but it was nowhere near ready for another use.
That didn’t matter. Shiv was going to use it anyway. Whatever it took to bring Longinus down. He resurrected another physical body just as he crashed into Georges. Instead of slashing at the Avatar, he sent rippling waves of splitting intent into Longinus’ looming shape. The god’s incandescent representation was little larger than an orc, but that didn’t mean anything when it came to power.
Or so Shiv thought.
Shiv’s first cut tore through Longinus without difficulty. The Deathless emerged in an eruption of pale crimson. Behind him, the god came apart in two, and Georges’ flesh was cleaved in turn. Both died with shared screams as Shiv felt his insides twist in misery. Georges turned to steam. Divine mana came spilling out of Longinus in a gushing tide. His lance burst apart in a spray of embers, and every lesser spear it was connected to snapped as well.
All except one. One that revealed a separate set of tethers leading to someplace afar.
“Pfft. Love it when they fall for the obvious bait.”
The counterattack arrived without warning. Shiv’s new physical body barely noticed the single lance that remained in the air at first, but it became the only reason Shiv survived. He went Non-Sequitur once more, but his mortal shell contained neither Magical nor Unique Skills.
The first lance popped Shiv’s new decoy. His Non-Sequitur state devolved into merely being outside context as Shiv bled life force to keep himself in existence, while beyond the bounds of reality. But other lances tore out from the first just as it struck Shiv’s decoy, and they utterly eviscerated Shiv’s physical form before he could make use of it at all.
His second death came with another broken skill and another lesson.
This god was a paranoid trickster, and hunting him down wouldn’t be so easy.
Skill Damaged: Pillar of Orichalcum
Pillar of Orichalcum 388 > 391
Phase Frame 96 > 98
Inertial Overdrive 296 > 301
Leviathan of the Shapeless Tides 532 > 533
Non-Sequitur 191 > 196
Shiv’s Severed Shadow curled in on itself as his Toughness crumbled. The slightest movement caused things inside him to break. Existing hurt. And he understood that getting hit by Longinus always came with a helping of brutal suffering.
Can’t just swing at him blindly. Can’t let him keep hitting me with those lances either. Every attack cuts deeper than flesh. Need to concentrate my Shapeless Tides—use them to repel the hits if I can. Lets me use Grudge-Tethered—gives me an opening to hit back once.
Sage of the Enkindled Heart: No. Stop and think. You don’t even know where he is. But he knows where we are when we’re in context. Right now, we have an opening—
“Why… why is my kitchen so damaged?” Longinus’ voice echoed from all around. Georges’s body reformed nearby and frowned at the damages. “The fuck happened here? I was fighting someone… I think?”
Sage of the Enkindled Heart: But this is our only opening. We need to keep breaking our own decoys and marking him. We skirmish and chip him down.
Shiv agreed. Stealth and surprise. Yeah. Got it.
Sage of the Enkindled Heart: Never stay in one place. With how his lances seem to ignore durability, there is little point in focusing on Toughness. We shouldn’t keep making physical bodies for him to keep killing, either.
Avoid. Hit. Break contact. With his new strategy formed, Shiv lashed out at Georges. Up close, he could still see the faint marks he'd left on the Avatar. The scratches were shallow, but they still leaked tendrils of incandescent mana into existence.
Longinus could be bled. He could be ground down.
Even if Shiv had to reduce himself to a bloodied nub, he would find a way to use mortal meat to drill through that mountain of alloy.
He ripped into Georges once more. When the latter burst apart in a puff of steam without any accompanying gore, Shiv realized Longinus had pulled another decoy trick of his own again. He Phase-Framed on instinct. A thousand divine lances bombarded the space he was in, melting perfectly spherical holes through the metal and ruining the city-spanning flat-top grill.
“DEATHLESS!” Princess Plum Blossom suddenly bellowed. Reality shook. “I TOOK YOU INTO MY EMBRACE AND YOU… YOU ATTACK MY CHEFS! YOU STRIKE AT SER CUNTUS WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION! YOU DISGRACE ME ON A W-WHIM!”
Her voice held a whining cadence, and she sounded like she was on the verge of crying. Shiv didn’t have time to deal with her shit—and frankly, she could go eat shit for employing a monstrous degenerate like Longinus as one of her chefs.
Shiv was forced to dodge again in quick succession as even more attacks came down like hail. Every lance carried with it a weight that could crack a soul, and there were hundreds of them striking at Shiv—with even more on the way. As he dodged again and again, he could feel a part of him clench and crack. His broken Toughness, paired with the limits of his Phase Frame, caused a portion of his vitality to break apart. Even with the constant influx of life force Shiv drank in from Integration using his Severed Shadow, he was losing the struggle of attrition.
Phase Frame 98 > 100 [Skill Evolution Imminent]
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on NovelFire. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
The rainstorm of lances never ceased—it only grew worse. The dimensionals in the air were spared as Longinus’ attacks glided through them without harm, allowing them to join in on the offensive as well. Fire Dimensionals began channeling the intense heat flowing through the grill as rising tsunamis of flame. Shiv couldn’t manage another Phase Frame without catastrophic damage.
So he dodged another way.
Strider of the Unbending Path 187 > 190
Shiv’s temporal shell fractured as he jumped back before Princess Plum Blossom—who had her cheeks puffed as she threw a tantrum to end all tantrums. Her face was beet red, and her breaths brought forth winds that could peel the soil from tectonic plates. Worse yet was how she ignored Shiv’s Chronomancy entirely, moving of her own accord, like the only timeline that mattered was hers.
Because that was probably how it worked around here, Shiv realized. Even so, even as the gales from her lips and nostrils battered him, turned sections of his weakened body to glass, it was better here than with Longinus.
Losing too much Vitae, though. Need to let my form go full Revenant. Intangibility’s a good idea right now.
Tactics 1 > 3
“DEATHLESS!” Plum Blossom shrieked as she noticed Shiv. “You dare—”
He sighed and cast himself back into The Boiling Toad without bothering to reply.
Non-Sequitur was used the moment he returned. That choice proved to be wise. LanceS tore his decoy apart, and Shiv felt himself plunge out of reality's grasp. His life force was flooding out now, burning away like a candle in a blizzard. He wouldn't be able to endure this for long from all the damage he'd sustained and how much of his Vitae shattered with the slightest movement.
The divine rain of lances briefly stopped as Longinus lost track of Shiv again. Another instance of Georges reappeared as fingers of steam stitched him back into shape. He staggered around, looking confused and lost. From the enormous gash he left in reality came a small army of dimensionals as well. Shiv’s insides dropped as he felt their magical fields wash over him. Pyromancy, Biomancy, Chronomancy, Hydromancy—Longinus hadn't just been attacking, he'd opened a dimensional zipper and called an army out from inside it.
Shit. There are hundreds of them. That’s a lot of Master-Tier dimensionals.
A crushing weight of coldness pressed against Shiv. He couldn’t stay Non-Sequitur; attacking the Avatar wasn’t an option either. Longinus was somewhere else entirely. Whatever he'd left here was just a decoy to lure Shiv out.
Sage of the Enkindled Heart: I know you don’t want to hear this, but maybe the better idea is to leave. We can ambush him later.
The idea was wise, but the very thought sickened Shiv. He’s using Georges’s body to… I can’t—
Sage of the Enkindled Heart: But what are we going to do? How are we going to fight him if we can’t even reach him?
The dimensionals, Shiv answered. I’ll tear into them. I’ll let myself fade into intangibility, attack them to get back some Vitae and cycle the damage out of me, and then revert time and go back to being intangible before he can hit me.
Sage of the Enkindled Heart: You’re dancing the edge. One mistake will see more of you broken. But that’s not our only option. We do have a way to find him.
Granted a moment to think and blessed with a rationality born of cataclysmic rage, Shiv remembered Longinus was afraid of him. As the cold winds of death pushed through Shiv's ribs and filled his stomach, he searched and found it: a faint cord that led up into the air, past a dense layer of smog that shrouded this hellish kitchen dimension. Longinus was up there, hidden but marked. The wounds Shiv had dealt to Daughter had shaken him.
The Wanderer might be able to smell Shiv’s emotions, but the Deathless had him on a leash made from terror he could follow.
Sage of the Enkindled Heart: Yes. Good. But we can’t just throw ourselves at him. We need to prepare. Surprise. Skirmish. He is lust-driven. Greedy. He views everything here as his. We don’t just attack him. We attack his property. We keep him emotional and off-balance. It shouldn’t be hard; the Ascendants all suffer from degeneration—we just need to use it against him. But first, take a drink of vitality. Make use of his dimensionals.
And Shiv did. He let the seconds pass, allowed himself to fade from the world, return to the state of a Revenant as his vitality was spent, and he drew close to the cliffside of oblivion.
Then, when he was about to vanish entirely, he struck.
Where cutting Longinus felt like trying to drive a halberd through an iron bulwark, the dimensionals were but wheat before a rolling storm of scythes. A trail of crimson mist painted the air behind Shiv with lingering traces of lost vitality. His Shapeless Tides' acceleration came at a cost. His body, crippled of Toughness, couldn't bear the speeds, but the life force he lost was outweighed by the bounty he gained. Every dimensional he tore through filled his being with a juicy rush of essence.
In a heartbeat, he went from a dying candle to a roaring blaze. His sudden return surprised Longinus as well. The lances didn't fall, not immediately. With his Avatar spared of harm this time, Longinus had no reference to where his enemy was, and so—
One of the dimensionals burst apart in a blast of divine mana. The rush of magic was so intense it seared a layer of Vitae off Shiv, like an onion being peeled. He reacted on pure instinct—cast himself back in time instead of dodging. His Chronomancy field cracked once more, but he was dragged away from the explosion and returned to the intangible state he was in while Outside of Context.
But though he was spared any damage to his flesh, his soul still felt something strike against its surface as a wall of lances and spells tore into Shiv’s mana fields. His senses went blank as his Psychomancy, Pyromancy, Hydromancy, and Chronomancy were blasted apart in quick succession. Only the flickering notification and a feeling of a Skill Evolution reeled his senses back.
He tried to right himself, but burning lashes of pain glided over his mind as his Aegis of Assimilation was mauled from all sides.
He tried to enter Non-Sequitur again—a moment too late. A violet spell splashed over him—painting in animated waves that pulsed every other second. As he tried to slip out of context, he felt himself plunge, deform, but not truly rupture through the System’s net. Longinus’ Divination spell had him in a net of context. Because how could he escape from the world if it was made to know where he already was at all times?
Shi—
Longinus appeared. There was no warning. There was no hint of where he came from. He didn’t soar through the air. He didn’t teleport. He just suddenly was right in front of Shiv.
And when he drove his lance forward this time, it ripped through Shiv’s Aegis, beheaded one of his mana hydras, and barely came to a stop as the Deathless was forced to materialize and spent every overflow vector he had to stop the coming thrust from skewering him completely.
Across from him, Longinus held his weapon in a single lazy arm. His divine visage burned around Georges’s trapped form, and inside, Shiv could see his mentor sobbing, could see his emotional core rotted and festering with black loathing.
It didn't just look like Henry’s core. It looked worse.
This was how Georges felt when Longinus wasn’t wearing him. All the time.
“Well, hello, again, Deathless.” Longinus’ voice was filled with mockery. And before he even finished the sentence, a million and one radiant lances blinked into reality all around Shiv, blotting out the sky and promising death. “That’s an interesting skill you got there. A rude one. Cut up all my dimensionals. Not very nice. Funny-looking vessel you got there too. I’m going to enjoy figuring out what it feels like later. For now, I think I’ll wear you instead. In fact, I’m willing to cut you a deal: You came here for this one, right? Well, he’s not your Georges. Doesn’t have any memory of you. But I’ll let him go all the same if you let me inside you instead. Hm? How about it? It’s either that or…” The lances shivered as they signaled Longinus’ meaning. “Well. I don’t really care how I get inside you.
Shiv didn’t think it was possible to hate someone more.
But with the notifications that appeared before Shiv’s eyes, his focus was briefly turned to something else.
Phase Frame 100 > 102 (Skill Evolution Reached)
Non-Sequitur 196 > 201 (Skill Evolution Reached)
Skill Evolution: Phase Frame (Adept) > Walker of the Phantom Path (Master)
Skill Evolution: Non-Sequitur (Unique) > Jump-Cut (Unique)
Skill Fusion: Walker of the Phantom Path (Master) - Jump-Cut (Unique) > Continuity Error (Unique)