351 Three Upon One [I]
Never engage your enemy when you are emotionally compromised, on their terrain, and outnumbered. When your enemy sets the initiative, even if you are a Pathbearer of a higher Tier, you are marching to the guillotine.
I know some of you are scions of noble families, Young Lords and Young Ladies. What you will learn in this course has little to nothing to do with the honorable duels you are all familiar with.
We do not war to give respect to our enemies and stroke our egos. We war to kill our enemies in the most efficient way possible. The ideal outcome to a battle is your enemy with a blade through the base of their neck and their back still to you, never having seen your face.
You all know the numbers, how many Adepts it should take to claim the life of a Master, and so on, and so forth, but warfare isn't a binary. We are here to defy statistics. We are here to skew and make outliers. When you decide the conditions of the battle, you can strip a Master of every advantage they possess and force them to degrade themselves on your terms.
You must master yourself, because your enemies will do everything they can to ensure things happen on their terms—including exploiting your emotions. Do not let them. You must be the ruler of your own mind. If you are not, someone will be the ruler of yours.
There is no counter against a deliberately engineered mistake.
There is an entire world that wants you to betray yourself. Don't let it.
—Captain Harry Irons, TacStrat 101, Phoenix Academy
351
Three Upon One [I]
No orders needed to be given. Shiv launched himself at Longinus with a surge of Shapeless Tides, and his two companions followed his lead. Adam was already within Shiv, fueling him with Heroism. Uva tethered herself to his mind and wove a layer of protective Psychomancy over his consciousness. From there, they became an alloy, three as one.
Aside from their first foray into the Fairwoods, it had been months since the three of them had fought together like a proper team. Yet there was no loss to their harmony. They were three of a whole: mind, body, and soul moving in tandem.
Adam triggered Commander's Foresight. Time seemingly halted. The three of them spent a moment to convene just as they were about to strike Longinus. The wrathful god was mid-turn, his lance burning like a star was coming apart inside it, on the verge of a final nova before an eternal abyss was fated to follow.
“Shiv, just a second, before we throw ourselves at certain death. Why in the Broken Moon are we fighting Longinus the Wanderer? How and why is he even here?” Adam’s question was answered by an influx of memories. Words alone were inefficient to convey the sheer mass of information they needed to exchange as fast as possible. Uva filtered through Shiv's memories, willingly given, with ease, and then used her Psychomancy to assist Adam in processing everything Shiv had lived through. At the same time, she took the initiative to share Adam's memories and her own with Shiv. An exchange of understanding took place as all their stories came together.
“Wait, another Legendary Skill. You too?” Adam made the mental equivalent of a choking sound. “Psychology, Psychomancy, Chronomancy, Striking Proficiency, and Silver Tongue? This is disgusting, Shiv. I didn't even get a Skill Fusion, and it ended up breaking my brain anyway.”
Uva said nothing, but the frustrated snort she cast into their minds was laden with all the scorn and jealousy she could infuse in the sound. “I would beg the System to answer me, if it could, why it thought it wise to directly elevate your Psychomancy of all things to Legendary-Tier.”
“Oh. Uh… Sorry?” Shiv coughed apologetically. But then the Harbinger prompted him to say something else to assuage any ill emotions among the group. Even the slightest bit of discord was a threat to them, especially when they were fighting a foe so fierce. “Just because it's Legendary doesn't mean I'm a proper Psychomancer. Frankly, the Psychomancy part got eaten by everything else more than anything. You saw what happened when I tried to dive into that elf slaver's mind. I couldn't do it. Still lack the knowledge and training. But if there's something wrong with their heart or their mind, I can crack them. I can shatter them from that single flaw. I'm still more of a magically attuned brawler than a mage.”
“I'd say you're a bit more than that now,” Uva said, pushing past the gash his evolution left on her pride and marveling at what he'd managed with Evanescia. “Your might is not the reason why you managed to best the Usurper-Narrator or survive against Longinus. You've always quite liked to use your tongue…”
A low chuckle escaped Shiv, and Adam let out a pained groan.
“...and now it lets you strike directly at someone's heart,” Uva finished, flicking the back of Shiv's head with a twitch of her Psychomancy. “And I think that is how we will finish this god.”
“But we need to keep him off balance and pinned in place,” Adam said, his mind burning through the details of the coming battle. “Psychologically fragile and blind with rage though he might be, he's still one of the Ascendants. Evanescia has demanded Shiv stay within the context of reality, so he can't keep skirmishing the way he did before.”
“I can't anyway, now that you two are with me,” Shiv grunted. “Neither of you can follow me Backstage, and I am absolutely not leaving you here with Longinus.”
“We can't let Longinus press his offensive. We need to keep him unbalanced and reactive, but we can't offer him any openings either.” Adam paused for a moment, compiling all they knew. “We also know that his skills transform based on his emotional state, so if we can keep him angry, he likely cannot separate himself and expand into a small army of riders. We want him besieged from all sides and with as few options as possible. And I think I can do something to his Divinity as well. I stunned Evanescia by striking her Heroism. I knocked her out of a person she was possessing. Maybe I can do the same for Georges. I'll be firing all the Shards of Exalted Flame I can at him anyway—see if we can overwhelm him."
“I'm going to go for his dimensionals and worshipers,” Uva interjected. “Maybe I can disrupt the power he gains from his faithful. That should provoke him even further. I'll also see if I can keep him trapped in a temporal stasis. Drown him with my Fractals, and bathe him in the Outside. You'll be able to cast your thoughts at him through my Fractals as well, Shiv. You can keep taunting him endlessly.”
An idea exploded inside Adam. “Right! The Fractals. Uva, summon as many as you can and use them to surround Shiv. Have them serve as a wolf pack for his body. If Longinus wants to engage Shiv, then have the Fractals intercept first. Whatever hit comes, they take it—hopefully their geometries will give Shiv long enough to jump across time or counterattack. We need constant temporal repositioning. That's going to be our greatest means of survival against Longinus. The Fractal swarms will stop us from being singled out easily, and active movement will prevent us from getting hit by his vacuum blows.”
The Harbinger offered its own advice. “Do not linger. Do not be greedy. Target his mind and maul his heart, but do not overcommit. Patience!”
“Patience indeed,” the Culturist echoed. There was a hint of strain in the orc's voice that Shiv hadn't managed to detect before. “I will lend what aid I can, and weave what magics I can muster, but the mass of my attention will be dedicated to holding Adam's Awareness at bay. And though I am loath to admit this…” He cleared his throat. “The strain of helping Adam stay sane has tested me. Immensely. As a result, one of my Skills is closing on level 500. I may be forced to Delve at some point in this battle.”
“Ah, fuck,” Shiv summarized his feelings.
“Quiet,” the Culturist replied. “As Adam will also be put out of commission once I Delve, I will do everything I can to delay that outcome—but I fear it is all but inevitable by this point.”
“Now?” Adam gasped. “Now, of all times?”
“It's really quite dramatic, isn't it?” The Culturist chuckled. “The System so often conspires for drama. Little wonder why a place like the Fairwoods would exist.”
“And we might be able to turn that to our advantage,” Uva said, many layers of her consciousness working in tandem. Through the Harbinger, Shiv felt the mechanisms of her thoughts far more keenly than ever before. The substances of Uva’s mind and heart flowed slowly and smoothly, and though ideas didn't often come to her in sparks of explosive inspiration, they built to a rousing crescendo after all she gleaned from her environment and her companions. “Longinus is a beast of greed and lust. He doesn't just want to kill Shiv. He wants to hurt and possess him. He wants to own him as a slave.” A growl of anger slipped out from her. “If there is an opportunity for Longinus to force himself deep into Shiv's mind to begin his defilement, he will.”
Shiv understood what she was getting at. “And since all three of us are connected, the Culturist can force the burden of Adam's Awareness onto Longinus if he slips into me.”
“We're effectively smuggling an Awareness bomb over to him through deception,” Adam muttered. “It's a good idea, but we don't know what kind of Awareness or mental processing skill Longinus has. On top of that, the risk of letting him into Shiv’s mind—”
“We won't,” Uva interrupted. She chuckled darkly. "In the chaos of battle, it can be hard to differentiate whose mana field has broken, especially when there are multiple Pathbearers hidden in the same body. “And the thing about my Psychomancy is that the strings are most expendable. Additionally, when enough are woven together, they offer quite a dramatic tearing and snapping sensation before an overwhelming blow.”
“System, that’s downright bloody devious,” Adam breathed.
A note of defiance flared alive in Uva's mind. “The Outside forces you to learn or be consumed.”
“And if things go south, we can break contact another way,” Shiv added. “I can jump myself back in time across my personal history—maybe even send us back to the keep in Plum Blossom’s necklace.”
“We don't even need to do that,” Uva said. “In fact, I think using your Chronomancy to escape the fight is a greater risk. Longinus might not be an accomplished time mage, but your Harbinger is still fragile, and I can see Longinus creating a field of slowed time to flay your Legendary skill. There is a reason why I'm going for the slaves and dimensionals—they will serve as our momentary retreats in this fight. In fact, all three of us can inhabit different bodies if we have to.”
“Yeah, I can do that, but again, not really an actual mind mage,” Shiv reminded her. “I can pry my way into someone's thoughts, emotions, and memories, but I can't navigate that real super well yet.”
“You needn't worry about that,” Uva said. “My Psychomancy strings are capable of moving of their own accord. I can use them to guide you if need be. And I suspect Adam won't have such an issue, since he can inhabit anyone who possesses the slightest, narrowest crevice of Heroism.”
“I didn't say your Heroism felt like a crevice, Uva. I said it was narrow and tight.” Adam’s pouting ended in a scoff. “Do you want to know who has a crevice? Evanescia. That's why I was capable of throwing my Domain against her at all—because despite everything, somehow she still possesses a measure of Heroism herself.”
“Yeah, well, I don't think we can count on Longinus having that,” Shiv said.
“I wouldn't be so sure, Shiv,” Adam retorted. “Most Ascendants are mutilated parodies of who they once were. We don't know the Pathbearer Longinus used to be, or if there's anything of that man left in him. We do know that his Avatar is Georges—and he definitely has enough Heroism for me to inhabit.”
“You think so?” Shiv asked.
“I know so. Shiv, in all of Blackedge, who else had a heart big enough to take in and basically raise an Omenborn orphan?”
To that, Shiv had no words to offer, but everything to say, and too much to feel.
So much, in fact, that he broke in three parts. A cascade of pain rippled out from Shiv's core. His emotional resonance was out of alignment with his mind, and so a portion of his consciousness collapsed, and a stretch across his back turned to fragmented glass, leaking blood. His pain was shared with his companions, and while Shiv weathered it in silence, Uva let out a pained gasp while Adam's mind flinched with surprised agony.
“Felling hells,” Adam hissed.
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“Sorry, shit, sorry. Emotions crept up on me.” Shiv bit back a groan of frustration. “Harbinger? What was that?”
“It was too much,” the skill whispered with sorrowful exhaustion. “I tried to bear what he represented to you, but it was too much, especially as I am right now. I broke under the weight. Avoid facing that grief for now—we are not ready yet, and it will see us undone before this fight even begins.”
Shiv grunted in agreement. “Alright. Uva, another thing—if I start thinking too much about Georges, turn my mind away. In fact, if I start thinking about anything that gets me too emotional, keep me focused. The Harbinger is a powerful skill, but he cuts both ways.”
“The same goes for me,” Adam added. “If the Culturist is incapacitated and we don't manage to transfer my Awareness over to Longinus, put me to sleep immediately. Don't let my Awareness swallow the both of you.” The Paragon sighed. “I didn't expect a Legendary skill to be so dangerous for the one getting it.”
“Tell me about it,” Shiv replied. “At least one of us is still stable.”
“One of us remains a Hero,” Uva murmured, though her glumness was now muted as she saw the penalty of premature power. “I think we've cleared the most pressing matters. So. Shall we see if three Unique Pathbearers are an even match for a false god?”
***
Longinus struck first. Even surprised, even damaged after hours of skirmishing, he remained a god still, an Ascendant blessed with unmatched power. The Wanderer's reflexes were honed to even greater heights by the fires of his rage, and his soul began to shift, making him a better combatant, a faster rider.
Not even the bend of the world could outpace his charge. His lance could strike beyond continents, leave gaping wounds where landmasses once stood.
What hope did a mongrel mortal have against him, even if the mongrel mortal could come back from being dead?
Quite a bit of hope, apparently.
Longinus moved. His resplendent lance shot forth. The fortress walls surrounding the outside of his kitchen hall ceased to be; a cubic kilometer of space was simply unmade from existence, consumed by vacuum. Behind him, the atmosphere combusted. Hundreds would burn. Dimensionals not of the realm of fire would be consigned to incineration. The slaves that were unfortunate enough to be caught in the tide would be swept away as ash.
And this Deathless fuck would be exsanguinated on the end of Longinus' shaft.
Or at least he should have been.
The Wanderer's divine lance pierced through the Deathless but struck nothing, parted no flesh, broke no armor, split no bone. The vacuum that destroyed the fortress walls didn't touch the Deathless at all, for he faded in a mirage of gold.
“Fucking Chronobullshit!” the Wanderer bellowed. His expression twisted in demonic fury, and his instincts took hold. His Legendary Reflexes greeted his Physicality, and he stopped in place. The air around him shattered. The ground beneath him tore. Metal became as if clay, and he spun on a dime, whipping his lance in a horizontal slash. A blade of incandescent energy tore across the world, distorting the distance between him and everything beyond. The Boiling Toad groaned as the country-sized dimension was bent inward in its entirety. The distortion was more than gravity, more than a collapse of mere Dimensionality: It was the Domain of Exploration wielded as a weapon, a deletion of space itself, and everything caught in that zone.
Longinus expected the Deathless to come from behind. Expected to see him falling in pieces—left with only a head and feet. But for the second time in a row, Longinus was surprised. An attack did come, but it wasn't unleashed by the brat.
It couldn't have been, for it too was tinged with the familiar incandescence of divine mana, and though it paled in comparison to Longinus' glory, it defied Longinus’s slash. The azure arrow was a shard of purest flame. It sang forth soundless notes that plucked at something within Longinus, something that was buried deep and supposed to be long dead.
Absolute terror took hold of Longinus. He stiffened and froze. The Wanderer had faced rival gods in the Fairwoods, divine entities that were lesser or greater than him in power. The facilitator of this event, the one who summoned and dismissed him at a moment's whim, was the ruler of this place, and the one he suspected of sending this attack.
No chance. No chance. No chance…
Psionic echoes battered Longinus from all directions. Memories he repressed came to him unbidden, tightening around his mind and body in chains of fiery shadow.
He recalled his uncountable attempts to escape from Evanescia. He recalled the humiliation he faced at her hand when he was cast down and tortured for his defeats. When he was embraced by gentle hands after the end of his torment, only to find out they were the same hands that had carved through his flesh.
No chance. No chance.No chance at all.
The voice taunting him turned into his own. The chains became a shadow formed from himself. He was holding himself back. Here was his own doubt, his own trauma, made manifest as a nightmarish set of bonds.
“No! Be quiet! Shut the fuck up! This is my realm, Evanescia! You promised! You promised that you wouldn't punish me if I just played along!” His voice turned hysterical with anger at the betrayal and the fear of losing everything he'd gained for himself in his eternal prison. “Evanescia, you promised—
The Wanderer's scream was cut off as the divine arrow struck him. The moment it did, he realized he'd been wrong. This wasn't an attack born of Evanescia. She did not wield the Domain of Heroism.
But this new enemy did. This new enemy drove a spike of shame, of purity, of virtue, of chivalric valor so deep into Longinus that it tore at the foundations of his existence. The strike was so agonizing that it unmoored Georges from the place he was anchored for a brief instant.
Longinus' divine visage flickered—but his willpower surged. He reacted, seizing his Avatar before the little man could tumble free, and breaking through the bonds of self-doubt in an explosive charge. The Wanderer reared his equine legs back, kicking at the air and slamming his hooves down upon the ground. Waves of tumbling fire spilled out from him, waves that battered the world, that melted his cooking district. They rose kilometers high and washed beyond the horizon, carrying with them the authority and wrath of a god who'd wandered worlds. The burning tsunami spared Longinus from any oncoming arrows, knocking them aside and dragging them off in rushing walls of mana.
But the damage was already done. It cut deep, piercing Longinus down to the bedrock.
***
Unbeknownst to the Wanderer, a slightest crack opened upon his soul. An incision was made, and, reaching out from the slightest of gaps, another awareness flickered into being—the shriveled seed of personhood, the source of the Ascendant Longinus eventually became.
What is this?
A whisper left a Pathbearer who regretted nothing more than becoming a god. As the first arrow pierced ever deeper, that feeling of defiance, of an urge to reclaim his body and cast away this unrightful divinity that festered within Longinus, took hold.
I'm done. Fuck this. You're going to stop this. You hear me? You're going to stop this. And I don't care if I have to destroy myself to make you.
And the splinter that remained of a long-forgotten man began clawing at the rubble piled onto him for the first time in lived eons, the barrier in his soul that blocked him from reaching his tainted Divinity.
***
As a quiet rebellion began within, a cacophonous war raged without. Longinus fought with nothing held back. He galloped upon blazing hooves, and the world blurred around him. He no longer allowed himself to be constrained by time or distance. With every stride, he cleared the horizon countless times over. He obliterated everything in his path. The world turned into an incoherent and deafening blender of destruction. He cared not for what was in his way. So long as he broke his enemy, he would gladly wipe everything he owned away and start over.
“DEATHLESS!” he roared, his voice rising over even the sound of the world coming apart. “I'm gonna wear your beloved daddy, Deathless, and I'm going to make him do to you what I made him do to that bitch back when he thought resisting didn't just make me HARDER!”
He slammed into the other side of his kitchen realm with the force of a meteor, hundreds of leagues away from where he'd been moments prior, and he flattened everything in his wake. The dimension-caging wall there ballooned outward, the alloys that composed it deforming beneath Longinus's force. The sudden stop sobered the Ascendant's mind. Why was he charging blindly? Why was he behaving like a bull when he was the rider, the chaser, the steed? He drew upon his Divination, and the System itself whispered betrayal, offering him the position of his enemy. Flowing tendrils of violet mana guided his gaze, his awareness—right behind him.
A mere sixty meters away, that fucking cocksucker hovered in mid-air. His body was veiled in gold and... Wait, did he look less cracked than before? Yes, all those fragments that used to make up his outside were now sealed. They weren't fused completely together, but a glow of divine mana made the Deathless's Chronomancy field seem more stable than ever before, and surrounding his body were swarms of hovering glass shards.
Longinus snorted in derision. “Vitrimancy. Cute trick. Did Evanescia give that to you? Did she bless you with a bit of divine power to make this fight fucking even? Well, she wasted it. She pissed that power away, because I'm going to tear you in half. I'm going to fucking RUIN you. It doesn't matter what she gave you, because I'm going to rip it out of you, and I'm going to fuck your corpse!”
Once more, the Wanderer rode. This time his lance was on line with his enemy, with no chance to miss. He galloped; existence bent to his will. The horizon rushed forward to meet him as the pitiful serf it was. But the horizon wasn't the only thing that came forth. The mess of floating fractals surrounding the Deathless exploded out in a cone and stung Longinus like a swarm of angry wasps. Lines of pain flared across the Wanderer's body, but Longinus didn't care. He blasted through the annoying fractals and—
The Deathless counterattacked from the right. He slammed knee-first into Longinus. With that blow came a reminder that Longinus was a god. A god was beyond mortals, but being hit by a Legend when your vessel was a mere Hero still came with a price in pain and damage. It wasn't just physical pain, either. It was emotional. It was mental. It was a blow that conveyed the full weight of the Deathless' hatred.
“Look at you,” the Deathless telepathically spat through his knee strike. A burst of black flame, wrapped in Psychomancy, swelled out from his attack and swallowed Longinus, fanning the internal discord already raging within the god. “Divinity was wasted on you. The other Ascendants? I get it. I understand why they made it to godhood. But you're just some bastard who wanders around, who fucks anything with a pulse, drinks wine and gutter water all the same, and devours everything he can get his hands on. God of Exploration and Hunger, my ass. You're the God of Addicts and Whores, hunting for a fix.”
The Deathless’ spite brought forth a ruinous alchemy, one that even a divine adversary couldn't resist.
Longinus's midsection turned to glass and shattered. A pain deep and true exploded through him, and for a moment, Georges was revealed, exposed within the marrow of his incandescent core. But the Wanderer wasn't so easily undone. He shifted in the air. Plumes of fire so condensed they became beams that carved gashes into the ground propelled Longinus as he slammed into the Deathless. A duel followed. Legend tries to struggle against deity, but Longinus thrust an arm forward and wrapped his hand around the Deathless's throat. He clenched tight, and he felt parts of his glorious golden armor shatter, felt the rush of hot blood spill free, and knew the moment of his enemy's death was at hand.
“Let's see you say that shit to me now, you little—”
And then Longinus started getting hit from everywhere all at once. Just as he was about to thrust his lance through the Deathless' skull, a mess of swirling fractals swept around his weapon, and geometry got very confusing indeed. Forward became up, and down became left. Every axis of movement was shifted with another, and Longinus found his arm twisting at the oddest of angles as he tried to work his way out from that conundrum. “What the fucking fuck is thi—”
Somehow, the fractals managed to get even more annoying. From within that swarm of flowing shards came tendrils that lashed and bit. They whipped at Longinus's mind, bouncing off his prodigious Magical Resistance, but they were merely a distraction. While Longinus ignored the pathetic Psychomantic attacks, he couldn't do the same with the shards of azure fire once again raining down on him. A rival Divinity struck at him once more, and for the second time, the Wanderer was shaken. Georges was unmoored from his person once more. To make matters worse, a bit of the enemy god managed to get into Longinus' Avatar, managed to stain the man with their fetid Domain.
“No! He's mine! They're all mine! Everything is mine! MINE!” Longinus' shrieks went apoplectic. The Deathless already had Longinus exploring new frontiers of anger, but this was another dimension of fury. Another god had dared to touch Longinus’s anchor—another god that Longinus now felt proper for the first time.
“Georges, it's alright. We're going to set you free. We're going to put him down.”
Longinus' mind halted. The voice was familiar. And recognition came to Longinus in a crushing instant. This was Roland Arrow’s voice! The burning shards earlier…
“Thaen?” Longinus whimpered. This Divinity. This feeling of righteousness. It had to be the Starhawk, but how could it be? Thaen was a blood brother, a true friend! How could he do this? How could he side with Evanescia? How could he side with the Deathless? “How… how could you—”
“No,” Roland Arrow declared, denying Longinus. “Not the Starhawk, not nearly. Not even a true god. But I think I am more than enough for you, you unworthy knave of an Ascendant.” Roland fell silent, and to Longinus' disbelief, the man reached out—extended a bridge of his own Divinity, his own Domain, over to Longinus. “But you weren't always this way. You couldn't have always been this way. I have glimpsed your Heroism, Longinus, and it is no crevice. It is a valley, a cold valley, left in ruin, but a valley nonetheless. You must have once been someone who cared. Someone who did the right thing. What happened to you, Longinus?”
What happened to me?
A softer, smaller, far more human voice slid underneath Longinus. And a memory came to him unbidden—no, more than a memory. A smaller portion of himself that had been hidden away for so long. The enemy god burning inside him became more like a candle flame, and lit something dormant inside Longinus. Something he hadn't been able to notice. Something that was sealed away.
What happened to me? I didn't want this. I didn't want to be this. I wasn't supposed to become this. I was more than some drunkard. I was more than a sex-fiend. I was… I rode for people. I was a knight once! I was a knight… I was…
But it wasn't enough. Whatever fire Roland bestowed was not enough. The voice was clenched away, and the hunger within the Wanderer took hold once more. “I'm not your bitch, Rand! But you're gonna be mine!”
And with the flex of his divine might, Longinus cast his adversary out and regained control of himself once more.
No, no, stop this. You were so close. We were so close to being free. We were so close to being ourselves again. We were so close. Inside, a voice sobbed. Inside, a man sobbed and found himself helpless to what was to follow. Roland, just finish me off. I don't want to be like this anymore. Give me peace. I know you; you're a good man, Roland. Just give me peace.
“You think you can come to where I live and take everything from me?” Longinus screeched. “You think that you can touch my kitchen, my slaves, my Avatar, and just fucking walk away?”
Tears ran down Longinus' face, tears that burned like streams of magma, and they spread across his body, fracturing the surface of existence and starting another transformation within Longinus. He began losing his sense of coherence. He shifted his lance and rammed it into his own forehead. The divine weapon was absorbed into his body, fused with it, and his body went from that of a centaur to a creature that was purely equine.
It had been centuries since Longinus was driven to this point, where the ravenous beast took hold, and the man became more distant than a dream.
“You'd better run now, you fucking cunts. You'd better run. Because I'm coming. I'M COMING TO RIDE YOU DOWN!”
The world began moving for Longinus, shifting him wherever he so desired. And in an instant, he was carried to where the rival god was hiding.
Longinus flickered and reappeared in place—with his horn pre-lodged inside the Deathless’ flesh.
The boy's eyes widened. His golden shell cracked. Blood poured out from between his lips, and Longinus thrust his horn in deeper.
“Well, would you look at that?” Longinus breathed with a feral chuff of hate and pleasure. He saw the divine flame burning inside the Deathless, and he understood. “Looks like Thaen did it—he made his little fuckbuddy an Ascendant too. And Roland took his own Avatar.”
Then the Wanderer’s inhuman expression twisted into a sadistic sneer as he licked his lips.“He should have chosen better.”