352 Three Upon One [II]
The higher an enemy's Tier, the more essential information on their capabilities is. Such is why Shadows, Scouts, and Diviners will always be among the most essential Pathbearers on your team, even if they aren't the most durable, magically gifted, or physically imposing.
At baseline, a Master-Tier Martial Pathbearer will have well over sixty Skills, ranging from Weapon Proficiency to Support and Survival Skills. That makes them immensely hard to predict.
Ideally, you want to know absolutely everything about who you're dealing with and what they can do, and slightly less ideally, you want to know at least a little. As I said, this is what Shadows and Diviners and the like are for.
But in the scenario where those fail, there's really only one good way to find out what your enemy can do: bait them out and throw someone expendable at them. If you're lucky, this will be a summoned dimensional or an enemy of your enemy. If you're unlucky, this will be you.
Yes, you, Adept Jenkins. I have heard how you address the Non-Vanguards—Luggage Attendants, you called them? And a few other titles I don’t care to repeat.
Well. Today, you will learn what command calls us Vanguards, including Master-Tiers like me:
The Meat. We are the Meat. And the Meat is to be spent, abused, used, and learned from.
—Captain Harry Irons, TacStrat 101, Phoenix Academy
352
Three Upon One [II]
The fact that Longinus still had more bullshit to pull out of his divine ass wasn't a surprise. What was a surprise was just how bullshit that bullshit was.
Shiv saw the attack coming, as did Adam and Uva. All of them reacted. They anticipated Longinus' charge and surrounded him in a messy spiral of Aberrant Fractals. He didn't have a good counter against the geometries, which made sense considering he was the Wanderer, not the Traveler; a God of Exploration rather than Navigation. Part of exploration was about getting lost, after all.
At the same time, the Fractals served as a medium for all their magics. Uva's puppeteer strings shot free from the constellations, and then came bolts of Cryo-Chronomancy. Glaciers of tarnished gold erupted all around Shiv. Beyond the cage of temporally frozen spikes, she also wove a dense bundle of Psychomancy, with each thread stitching itself in place. Her strings were so fine and translucent that if not for the faint shimmer offered by their mana, one wouldn't notice them at all. Longinus would have to fling himself upon her magic to reach Shiv—consign himself to play as a fly to the Seeker’s spider.
If that wasn't enough, Adam could fire his Shards of Exalted Flame through her Fractals as well, each capable of striking the foundation of Longinus’ existence.
And at the heart of this hastily constructed fortress was the Deathless himself, supercharged by Heroism, empowered beyond the limitations of time, a weapon capable of breaking mind, body, and heart. Even a deity operating at the peak of the Legendary threshold should have struggled to break through their impromptu fortress, according to the war games Adam ran in his mind.
But the annoying thing about gods and powerful Pathbearers was how they always had a way to defy the conventional rules of reality and warfare.
Longinus transformed. He thrust his lance into his own head, and his five-meter-tall, incandescent body shifted from that of a centaur into a pure steed, a unicorn of all things. His divine weapon fused with his soul as much as his body, and it grew greater, longer, nearly the length of his entire body prior.
With every stamp of his blazing hoofs, the fabric of spatial reality tore and ruptured, spilling flickers of Dimensionality that breached that gap. A horde of lesser unicorns followed from a place beyond places, riding out to form a vortex. Yet Longinus wasn't done. As he finished rearing back, he strode forward, but rather than him moving, it was like the very substance of time and space folded. If the world were a canvas lying atop a table, then Longinus was a knife rammed through both while the canvas was pushed forward, dragged toward a single anchor point of stability.
The rules of reality shifted on a level Shiv simply couldn't comprehend as Longinus tore through time and through space, arriving in a blurring instant as the System itself seemed to deliver his target to him, rather than the other way around.
The Wanderer passed through all of the team's defenses without engaging with them at all, and when he arrived, he did so with his spiraling horn already lodged through Shiv's chest.
Shiv broke in two parts and along three aspects. His Harbinger was run through first, and an explosion of pain went off behind Shiv's skull as his Legendary mana fields were eviscerated entirely. But the pain of the mana strain paled in comparison to the punishment dealt upon his mind, heart, flesh, and soul.
The Harbinger burst and bled. Vitae and true blood both seeped out from the cracks parting his body, for what was the Harbinger but a perfected version of Shiv existing in the inevitable future? All coherence was banished from Shiv's brain, and the dam built around his heart ruptured, causing his anger to flow forth in a near-uncontrollable tide. Worst of all, however, was the skill damage. Shiv felt a piece of himself fracture and a central pillar of his being crack.
Longinus breathed something, his voice ravenous with satisfaction and hateful glee, but Shiv didn't hear him, was too focused on the notification that appeared in his vision.
Skill Damaged: Return to Sender (Master)
The agony was immense. The damage ran deep. But, for all intents and purposes, things could have been much, much worse. For how deep Longinus drove his lance into Shiv, the wound he inflicted was muted. The Wanderer’s horn should have shattered Shiv. In all other outcomes, it would have, striking the still fragile Harbinger. But there was a greater will holding Shiv together, an equally divine will, sourced in Heroism and fueled by virtue.
“Shiv!” Adam called out, using all he had to press back against Longinus. An ejection of azure radiance erupted from Shiv and splashed against the Ascendant impaling him. The Paragon pushed, but despite all he'd gained, he wasn't a full god, and so he was as if a child driving himself against the leg of a titan. He wasn't alone. Threads of Psychomancy spewed free from Shiv’s mind and wrapped around Longinus, prying and trying to twist his horn. Shiv himself clutched the horn piercing through his chest and spent every tide he had to tear himself free. Three Pathbearers fought in tandem within one body. With that action of unity, three were synchronized as one, and they became greater than the sum of their parts.
“The fuck is—” Longinus’ words turned into an aggravated howl as he was besieged from all angles. Though his new evolution allowed him to move in defiance of time and space, pulling the very tapestry of existence to reposition himself, it didn't prevent him from being attacked. So utterly focused on his newest victim, he failed to realize one thing: just because he managed to skip past all the defenses arrayed against him didn't mean they were useless. In fact, when one moved themselves inside a fortress, then the metaphorical walls and turrets became an encirclement instead.
Fiery arrows erupted free from Aberrant Fractals that spawned cones of time-halting cold as well as puppeteer strings, and all fell and tore into the Wanderer like a rainstorm made from rabid snakes. Every blow Adam inflicted sent a reverberation through Longinus’ being—caused him to misalign from Georges. The mana frequencies between god and Avatar were disrupted, and the two became as if clashing vibrations. “FUCKING QUIT THAT—”
But under Longinus’ roar came a smaller voice, a determined voice, and for the briefest of seconds, the Ascendant named Wanderer was usurped by a foreign will. Georges was pushed free from the incandescent aura that comprised Longinus’ godly shape. The chef was battered and bleeding, confused and disoriented. But he was trying to push forward—trying to slip out. “Keep going! Fucking kill me if you can! I’m ready! I don’t want to be like this anymore! Roland—I know you! I believe in you! Do it!”
Seeing his mentor so close to escape gave Shiv pause. The Deathless stopped struggling to free himself and instead reached out, desperate to pull Georges free. He tried to cast himself across time using the broken Harbinger, but his chest tore even more when he tried. Longinus’ horn didn’t just shred his being, but also pinned him in place existentially. It was like reality had been given an edict to keep Shiv in position so long as he was stuck on that horn. “Godsdammit!” Shiv snarled. “Georges—”
"Shiv! Focus! We cannot reach him!" The Harbinger bled like an open vein, yet it was rapidly closing, cauterized by Adam's resplendent Heroism. But in this matter, it was Shiv who was more damaged. The horn had pierced someplace deep, and it was hard for Shiv to master his thoughts. He was lost within himself, his mind behind his emotions. Black flames flickered around the Harbinger in representation of Shiv's discord. But once more, the Harbinger made its Legendary state known. Even before its Delve, a Legendary Skill was Legendary indeed. The Harbinger grasped the enkindled flames leaking out from itself and tore them asunder. The fires representing Shiv's emotions were shredded like paper, and the anguish that followed was brutal.
But it lasted only an instant before numbness followed—a crushing anhedonia enforced by the Harbinger upon Shiv. The skill grew weaker; its golden resplendence and Psychomantic translucence lessened. Unable to draw from his rage as a source, his mind took precedent once more. His thoughts overcame the banished fires, and now the Deathless was sobered. His hands clamped down around the horn once more, and he pushed back.
Instead of trying to break Longinus' horn, he directed his Shapeless Tides backward and wrenched himself free in a final rush of acceleration.
Trails of Vitae and golden fragments spilled through the air. An ache coursed through Shiv—a feeling of hollow pointlessness behind every struggle he endured. He didn't see a way out. He didn't see a path to victory beyond Longinus. There was the Usurper-Narrator, the Ascendants, Veronica, the Tarrasque, Udraal, and after that, what was there to look forward to? An Incursion, more battles, more strife. He had resolved to break free from the System's whims of violence, but it had so easily drawn him back in.
It's all fucking—
The foreign darkness drowning his thoughts was siphoned away from him. For a second time, someone modified Shiv's emotions and drew what was his ruin into her power. A glow of wondrous colors began blossoming around Shiv's head. Petals expanded around Uva's strings, making it seem like an Outsider flower was opening up behind Shiv. He felt her gaze widen behind his. He felt her open a channel directly to the Outside, to the Dreamtaker's realm, where something was slowly stirring, waking after a long, enforced slumber.
But above that, he felt his rage return; a torrential downpour of emotions followed as his heart reignited.
Concurrently, twin rivers made of flowing feathers and shifting colors spilled out from his eyes and crashed into the Wanderer, drenching the Ascendant in a colorful coating of chaos that served as the spawning pool for the Dreamtaker’s offspring. Feathered tongues and kaleidoscopic serpents tore into the Wanderer. They harassed and covered his face, but they all evaporated in puffs of mana when he flexed his fields of divine mana.
All except one.
A single feathered serpent was squished flat. Literally. Its body was compressed until it was two-dimensional, and there came a comical sound effect that projected an attached “OUCH!” text-bubble out from its injured form—and directly into Longinus’s head. The text bubble bounced Longinus back, and the flattened feathered snake threw itself at the Wanderer with a rising yodel as a battle cry.
And it didn’t charge alone, for the Dreamtaker’s colors shifted, creating more instances of that strange serpent that reminded Shiv of the Winter Court’s Red Riding Wolves.
The Dreamtaker is entering a state of pre-hibernation.
The Dreamtaker has been inspired.
The Dreamtaker has obtained a (Narrative) Skill.
The Dreamtaker has reached an imminent evolution.
What? Shiv’s mind went blank. That explained some things, but it also caught him by complete surprise as well. He wasn’t alone; even as Uva kept her focus on the battle, her insides were reeling. The Outsider God had been slumbering since the Eldest infiltrated Uva’s soul. What had prompted this?
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from NovelFire. Please report it.
“Sorry, I was too focused on the fight.” Uva's quick apology paled in comparison to the potency of her power. She tore away his self-inflicted trauma. She absorbed his mental wounds, and they became her power. All this while Adam mended both their souls, bathing them in an invigorating glow of Heroism that sent their levels skyrocketing, that bade Shiv's damaged skill to start reconstructing itself in seconds rather than hours.
And just in time. Shiv wasn't the only one to restore himself. The moment he recovered, Longinus did as well. His eyes were like twin stars shattering with every beat of his divine heart, going supernova, and somehow, the lance that became his horn shone even brighter. A vacuum shroud formed around Longinus. The ceaseless attacks unleashed by Uva passed through him, emerging from the sides of his body as if he were an open door. However, he couldn't dodge Adam's arrows so easily, so he formed protective shields of amber brightness, and they danced around him in a swirling aegis.
Shiv felt an intense heat within each of those protective panels, and he recognized them from his earlier skirmishes. Longinus could summon bulwarks shaped from the purity of his emotions, and since he was a God of Hunger as well, the sensations and feelings he gorged himself upon were nigh unbreakable, even when struck by someone who possessed the strength to crush a world between their hands.
Heavenly arrows of azure glory greeted dense shields shaped from divine hunger. The resulting clash was blinding, overwhelming. From every arrow Adam fired, there came a ghostly effigy of himself, an afterimage that continued firing in the Paragon's stead, but otherwise remained intangible, untouched by all harm. For a scant second, Longinus vanished in a colossal detonation of incandescence, but Shiv could still track the god. Could still see his emotional core growing ever larger as every centimeter of its space was filled by absolute, unrelenting fury—with even more was spilling over into the world.
"This is our doing; his skill transformation is unstable, but it shouldn't be. I think it's meant to amplify his emotions, letting him possess an absolute power of exploration where the world moves for him rather than the other way around. But our skirmishing left him cracked and broken earlier. We are not the only ones with a wrist slit—his Avatar and Divinity are both too damaged to sustain this power for long."
Shiv quickly understood why the Harbinger had made this guess. The enkindled flames that fueled Longinus' heart were combusting violently, breaking free from his body, even dealing damage to his form. Ruptures opened across his flesh, and vents were created where divine skin was unblemished.
And the blackest flames that divorced themselves from Longinus formed mocking manifestations of the god. A mirror unicorn forged of midnight hatred and born of the Harbinger draped itself over Longinus, bit down upon his neck, and inflicted upon him an unneeded indecision.
“Keep going! Keep going!” Longinus’ two voices howled, twin edges, one anguished, the other furious, each at war with the other. “I will fill your corpses with—KILL ME! Kill me now—RAND! HOW DARE YOU?!”
Longinus lashed his head to the left, then right. His horn projected a vacuum tunnel high up in the air, cleaving an impossibly clean gouge through the smog-choked clouds above and rising further to split dimensions and erase the inner walls of Princess Plum Blossom's keep.
Nothing made of matter withstood the Wanderer's wrath. Everything anchored to physical space ceased to be, a clean gap carved open for as far as the eye could see. From all the levels kilometers above, Shiv could see other pocket spaces torn asunder, casting down a rain of people from other kitchens, chefs tumbling out from the open wound left in their floor—the Boiling Toad’s spatial ceiling.
Longinus tried to lower his head to catch Shiv in his vacuum tunnel, but his enkindled clone drove itself upon him, knocking him off course once more, and painting another apocalyptic slash above. Recovered of mind and heart, Shiv activated Legion of Self once more and joined in on the barrage of attacks. His mana hydra erupted out from him and unleashed a tidal wave of lacerations and plague-infused attacks that were certain to detonate as crimson explosions against Longinus's godly Magical Resistance. His meager Pyromancy and Hydromancy were unleashed in tandem as well—every little bit to add to the chaos, if only to piss Longinus off more.
At the same time, he spewed forth a barrage of spells and resurrected two more bodies, both to serve as decoys. They were left in place while he cast his Severed Shadow one second into the future and right behind where Longinus currently was with his Harbinger. For his Severed Shadow, the world vanished into a dilatory path of surging gold. For his two other bodies, however, the present flowed as normal; neither of them was guarded by the attuned mana of his new Legendary Skill. Another drawback to account for.
His physical bodies were cast forth as sacrifices. Shiv didn't care if Longinus destroyed them and accepted the skill damage that was certain to follow. When the Wanderer regained his bearings, he would attack, and there would be nothing Shiv could do to stop him. When Longinus strode, the System helped him move. The System was not Shiv's ally.
The Wanderer's mind and emotions were a maelstrom of madness. He was not his own master. He just wanted something to run through and break, and Shiv would give that to him—offer both physical bodies as poison satisfaction. And while Longinus savaged the obvious targets, Shiv would descend upon him once more from his blind side—leave the cracked god more broken than ever before.
"He is less himself with every blow we land," the Harbinger encouraged. "One strike after another: strike and then move, strike and then move, strike and then move. Never stay in the same instance of time; always give him something else to hit."
And as Shiv's Severed Shadow transitioned into the future, something else surprised him. Uva was carried within him. As such, she was caught in his lag, so her threads and Fractals briefly came to a halt without a governing soul to guide them. But her cartoonish serpents continued to assail Longinus, and though his blows left them tumbling, discombobulated, and deformed, none of these new, Fae-like serpents were destroyed. That realization paled in comparison to the fact that Adam was still firing his arrows from inside Shiv’s soul even while they were moving across time.
“Wait, holy shit! How are you doing that, Adam?” Shiv's words echoed inside, and the Paragon laughed as if he wasn't affected by time at all.
“I can't rightly say,” Adam replied. Every time he fired a Shard of Exalted Flame, he manifested over Shiv's shoulder in a form constructed from azure incandescence. His bow was an arc of star-stuff, and his arrows burned pure and bright, cleaved across the expanse of time, each shot loosed as if he was still in the present, not being carried toward the future.
Longinus then surpassed Shiv's expectations once more. First, his indestructible amber aegis intercepted every single arrow fired at him, even the ones unleashed by Adam's ghostly effigies. Beneath the constant barrage of Heroism in the projectiles, none of the Wanderer's protective panels suffered even the slightest hint of a scratch. But where the Ascendant was awesome in flesh and magic, he betrayed himself through action, his mind ground in pure emotion, rendering him more beast than man, more monster than individual.
It suddenly struck Shiv how fitting it was that the Wanderer had turned into a unicorn. But with the way he's acting, maybe a bull would be a better fit.
And like a bull, Longinus charged once more. Shiv knew what to expect this time, but knowing what to expect meant nothing when your Reflexes were outmatched so severely. Longinus wasn't even a blur. He simply appeared inside one of Shiv's resurrected bodies. The wound that he made was immense, and that version of Shiv died in an instant.
Leviathan of the Shapeless Tides 538 > 540
Pillar of Orichalcum 404 > 408
Inertial Overdrive 318 > 322
Harbinger of Tripartite Ruin 216 > 218
However, though the Wanderer moved faster than light, his arrival unstoppable, like a long-foretold destiny, he had a weakness in his current form as well. He could only occupy one point in reality. As he cut down one of Shiv's bodies, the other moved to grapple with him, locking arms around the unicorn's throat to drag him down and hold him in place with all the strength Shiv could spare.
But the Deathless wasn't done yet.
The Garden of Wounds and Broken Things bloomed within his flesh for the first time. As soon as his Severed Shadow arrived back in the present, the change took shape within Shiv's physical body. It was like his biology became a seed for something. Yet his flesh didn't change immediately, not like it had Backstage.
Rather, there was a buildup inside it, a burgeoning of vines and veins and architectures that awaited their release.
And that came when Longinus blinked away from Shiv's grasp. Reality spirited the Wanderer past the threshold of Shiv's grasp before returning him again, like existence driving a dagger down upon Shiv's mortal form. Shiv splattered. His remaining physical body was rendered a smear of viscera and tumbling limbs amidst the rain of bodies and crumbling architecture falling from the shattered dimensional barriers in the sky, but he did not die. Instead, a feeling of flourishing vitality swept through him as his mangled corpse became the epicenter of growth.
Shiv transformed. His body, once merely humanoid, exploded outward as chains of lacerations, cuts, bruises, contusions, and ruptured organs sprawled out from his blood, from his existing injuries. They were followed by landslides of concrete and stone, of collapsing buildings and falling skyscrapers. All that and more slammed into Longinus, and though the Wanderer's godly form suffered no damage, he was gripped by confusion.
And that momentary distraction proved painful.
Shiv's Severed Shadow emerged from its temporal leap. Once more in the present, he seized the moment and channeled every overflow vector he had left, and flung himself like a Legendary missile. He slammed down on the Wanderer's back and delivered a brutal elbow to his neck. If the act was purely physical, he would have achieved nothing. But as he struck, his Harbinger struck with him, and so a sound of shattering glass followed his attack. The shattering was a cascade, like every single window pane falling out of a high-rise, one after another.
As Shiv's physical body came apart and spawned a garden of destruction, Longinus broke. Blackened flames bled out from its cracking body as its emotions oozed out in messy splatters like intestines might escape a disemboweled stomach. The two unravelings happened in sync, and as Shiv's new Unique Skill began to blossom, he drove another hook into Longinus’s skull and implanted a declaration that burrowed deep to the god's very core.
“Nothing is yours. Not your body. Not your slaves. Not your kitchen. Not your fate. You are owned. And you're not even a slave. Not even a pet. Not anything worth noting. You are Evanescia's pet, at best a tool to be used, spent for her amusement and my actualization. The Great One's power was truly wasted on you. What kind of god ends up as a side character in someone else's story?”
Accompanying the scathing insult delivered through Shiv's blow was another shard of azure brilliance. This was fired at point-blank range, and it struck with such force it flung Shiv off the Wanderer’s body. Georges once again distended from the underside of Longinus’ divine shell. Shiv flung his Severed Shadow two seconds into the future—and high up into the air to break contact, but just as his Harbinger flared bright, a salvo of Cryo-Chronomantic spikes slammed Longinus. While the tarnished icicles shattered against his Magical Resistance, they exploded out and formed a dense cocoon of halted time and nonsense space around Longinus—whereupon Uva added her pre-existing stalagmites to the mix.
The Wanderer was buried. His voice shattered into an incoherent chorus. He sobbed, he wailed, he raged, he cursed. And yet, through all the godly screams, he admitted that mortal he once had been, for that faint presence which wrestled against the rest of him, that mantle the fiery black steed made manifest through the Harbinger laughed! Laughed with relief! Laughed because his final rest was close at hand, and he might not need to die a monstrous parody of the hero he'd been.
“So long,” Longinus’s long-silenced conscience sang out. “I’ve been trapped for so long. I've dreamed of this moment for so long. Set me free. Let me ride the eternal fields. Set me free for good. Take me to a life where I never descended, where I stayed with the dragons—or on the farm back home…”
But the rest of himself wasn't done.
The Wanderer was finished with insults, beyond vulgarity, and freed of sanity. The madness of his rage fully took hold, and Longinus flung his shadow aside, bit down on its throat, and drank in deep. He swallowed and digested his rage as his horn grew curved and transparent. Instead of becoming brighter, it became a portal to all the places Longinus had visited, of the many dimensions he'd passed through, of the countless breathtaking vistas he'd witnessed. All that represented the crystallization of his power and identity: a roamer of distances great and vast, his spirit and body implacable, unbound from the limitations of time and space!
A stolen piece of the Great One’s boundless power, the Wanderer was meant to soar, to ride down his enemies, to surpass the horizon and everything beyond. And this highest desire transcended mere emotion to become an existential law.
But as Longinus underwent an active evolution, a titanic shadow rose behind him. A shadow that Shiv commanded. The Deathless marveled as his body took shape, but it wasn't just his body. It was the collective destruction inherited from all his battles.
A crown of concrete formed his skull. His eyes were hollow, and the insides spilled blood as rivers. His spine was constructed from segments of broken skyscrapers. The tower he'd broken earlier was part of that alloy. Its shape, still glass, still shattered, yet a part of this greater whole. An exoskeleton was formed over him, a literal one made from broken bones. The substance that filled his insides was woven into shape by threads of injuries, by chains of slashes and open gashes that once caused bodies to weep their inner red. And from behind Shiv sprouted a mess of whips. They extended out in a sprawling cape made from uncountable ropes of interconnected mutilations.
Shiv felt every bit of damage, every single injury that comprised his new form like they were a cell in his biological body. More importantly, he could call forth the entire garden in an instant. What he experienced Backstage was an inversion of what the skill actually provided there. His body served as a seed, filling a space in the Outside with the artifacts of destruction he created. All those artifacts were manifested in a new form—a titanic form.
When the Garden of Wounds and Broken Things triggered upon the destruction of his physical body, a greater manifestation of himself rose, and it rose for four hundred meters in width and twice again that in height. And with every passing second, it kept growing, larger, larger, until it loomed over Longinus like a titan staring down a gnat.
Shiv's mouth fell open as a disbelieving chuckle escaped him. “Okay, now I feel stupid for putting things off; this skill is two percent bullshit and one hundred percent felling awesome.”
“What the bloody hells is that?” Adam cried, so startled by the titanic garden-formed Shiv that he stopped loosing shots at Longinus.
“I second that question,” Uva added, her normal coolness banished as her heart skipped a good five beats. “What in the Composer’s loving melodies did you just summon, Shiv?”
“Less a summoning, more a transformation.” Shiv chuckled. “Turns out, turning into the daddy of an eldritch entity is much better than it sounds.”
Garden of Wounds and Broken Things 101 > 104