353 Three Upon One [III]
…are among the main reasons we stand as the dominant peoples of Integrated Earth instead of the many species of monsters that exist.
Monsters, non-sapient creatures possessed of skills, have many natural advantages. They are biologically built for war. Who can think of a human as a fearsome warrior when placed next to a deep-sea Loch-Strider? And who would imagine an elf being a mighty mage after witnessing the Skyfall descend with lightning naturally encoiling their bodies and the wind dancing at their feet, carrying them like little gods of old?
In fact, of all the sapient races on Integrated Earth, it is exclusively the automata that possess similar natural physiological advantages, weapons built into their bodies. But even they are required to evolve in certain ways to achieve these, and thus understand the advantages that come with social unity.
Unity with the Pathbearers around you is required so that where you lack, someone else might carry you, so that craftsmen can build you the right armor, forge you the right weapons, grant you the right tools for any challenge, or the right antidote for any poison.
Civilization remains the greatest skill we possess, for civilization is made up of countless Pathbearers like you and me, dedicated through life to a different facet, covering up for all the places we lack.
But civilization is a monster in and of itself, for there is more than a little beast in all of us. We are ravenous when we are hateful, seized by uncontrolled emotions and guided by instinct alone. We become creatures walking two divergent paths, and as we tear, civilization tears.
The point of this class is twofold: to teach you the responsibilities of being a citizen of the Yellowstone Republic, and to teach you that this world is dangerous. Protecting yourself against Social Skills is necessary, as is understanding how to regulate your emotions so that you do not do anything that demeans yourself or damages the fabric of your community.
We struggle and evolve alone, but we live among others, and it can be a beautiful thing if you live rightly.
Remember, children: The most nightmarish hell possible in our society is one in which you are not a functional member of it.
So, to begin our first class today, I would like to offer you all a word: There is nothing wrong with being alone. There are many advantages to being alone. There is everything wrong with being lonely. A lonely Pathbearer becomes a dangerous Pathbearer, becomes no different, sometimes, than the monsters we send our warriors to hunt.
Do not let your hearts deform, children.
—Master-Advisor [Removed at Request of Inquisition], Charm-444 (Discontinued due to matters of national security)
353
Three Upon One [III]
Shaped from the detritus of devastation and physical maladies that delivered one unto death, Shiv's titanic form didn't march across the battle-scarred landscape so much as it tumbled forward like an animated avalanche. Pieces of ruin that made up his body shifted around, and he flung all of himself forward in a tide of devastation. He wasn't even moving this body with his Shapeless Tides; he was simply commanding his Garden to spread in a specific direction.
And spread it did, reaching out with an arm the size of a mountain to strike down a god.
The illimitable, interlinked lacerations that comprised his cape lashed out as a sea of descending whips. They snaked through the air and closed in on Longinus from all sides. But though surprised for a moment by the sudden appearance of Shiv's titanic manifestation, the Wanderer regained his composure, and he moved—though he didn't move immediately. The Cryo-Chronomantic frost Uva had inflicted upon him had to break before he could shift across existence. It seemed certain rules still applied when it came to his greatest skill.
Longinus was stymied just long enough for Shiv to sting him with a single whip, and though the physical blow inflicted no damage, the merest moment of tactile contact with the Deathless brought forth agony unrivaled. The wound-shaped whips were more than a physical weapon; they became injection sites meant to deliver Shiv's scorn and wrathful thoughts upon Longinus, and siphons that allowed him to pry away the Wanderer's vitality.
And even a fracturing god still had an ocean's worth of life force to give. Connecting Longinus to the membrane of the world came with catastrophic effects: a blooming of crimson essence stained existence for ten kilometers in a second, and twice again that in another.
A scream of purest agony escaped Longinus as his very essence was funneled out from him and into the firmament. A new emotion split the fury fueling the Wanderer down the middle—an onrush of fear that grew into an ever-widening chasm, and with it, Longinus' soul began to shift once more. His great horn ever brighter, ever purer, and the shifting collage of places and faces he'd borne witness to across his centuries of life blurred as if a rider was traversing them at unmatched speeds.
Then, without any warning at all, the eldritch cage around Longinus shattered as he blinked across the world and drove his unicorn form horn-first into Shiv's manifested Garden.
Where reality seemed like crumpled paper around Longinus before, now it became ruffled, like an article of woven cloth bundled up by a clenching fist. Distance became a concept beneath Longinus. The Wanderer no longer needed to concern himself with movement whatsoever, not even the illusion of it. He simply manifested to where he so desired. But even so, the world still reacted as if he had passed through it.
Everything went white.
Molecules, mana, space, and all things between were absolutely annihilated as Longinus struck.
His horn charted his path. The tip marked his destination. And a lack was made through Shiv's Garden of Wounds and Broken Things.
The Wanderer vanished at the same moment Shiv's Harbinger reappeared in a flash of gold. One moment, Shiv's Garden was whole. Then, in an aberrant instant, it was hewn clean through, bisected, and robbed of a good quarter of its mass. But the anomalous ruins comprising Shiv didn’t come asunder, even when bifurcated once and a thousand times again. Any hint of pain remained a distant prospect as well. Before, when Longinus tore into Shiv, he carved not only the substance of his flesh, but also his mana and the foundations of his soul.
Meanwhile, the severance he inflicted upon the Garden felt right.
The godly wounds Longinus left merged with the rest of the lacerations. The hollow gaps parting the Garden's body flowed away and were absorbed by a tumbling mass of crumbling buildings and splattering organs that fused over the missing parts. Instead, the hollow injuries provided by Longinus were connected behind the titanic body to the laceration whips that formed a cape of flowing red. The new extensions emerged at the very bottom, becoming hollow spots blemishing the face of existence.
The Garden of Wounds and Broken Things is delighted by this new devastation.
The Garden of Wounds and Broken Things is growing.
Garden of Wounds and Broken Things 104 > 107
Longinus continued skipping across reality within the Garden's body. He appeared inside the Garden's skull and thrust his horn up. The eldritch titan’s head unfurled into petals of bone and shattered concrete; glass and stone rained down from the sky as ruptured organs were rendered into bloody mist. But the Wanderer's blow went further still, creating a hollow path that went on for dozens of kilometers, striking deep through the other parts of the keep that contained the pocket dimension of the Boiling Toad. Chaos and discord rang down from above as Fae and other Pathbearers scrambled to respond to this internal attack.
“Ser Cuntus!” came Princess Plum Blossom's shrill cry. Her voice made reality tremble, and the depths of her emotional anguish struck Shiv like a tidal wave. Immense and powerful though the Princess of the Summer Court was, she handled conflict poorly and any threat to her impending delicacies poorer still. “What are you doing? What is the meaning of this? You’re—you’re ruining my pre-appetizers!”
Longinus mustered a response, but he was so consumed by fury and the budding fear that Shiv only made out cries of “shut,”“cuntcuntcunt,” and “bigbitchfuckshutfuckup.”
The Wanderer's frenzied storm of attacks betrayed how aggrieved he was. He blinked through every section of the Garden, carving its limbs off, severing it until it was only a torso, and shredding that as well. But the Garden didn't fall apart. The gaps didn't affect it like they would a natural body. In fact, wounds were just conjunctions to it, new joints to be added—new portions to a burgeoning titan of inimical horticulture.
Everything Longinus did only added another layer, another slab, another endowment of power upon the Garden, and through it on Shiv.
He could invoke the Garden, could channel it out from himself as a source, but he was just a seed from which the Garden was birthed. And his original, mutilated form remained buried deep in the apocalyptic human avalanche, surrounded by a dense layer of infected slashes and shattered glass.
Such was the best way of describing this skill. The Garden of Wounds and Broken Things was like growing a town-sized set of armor that feasted on devastation around himself. It was at once absurd, empowering, and insulating—and its sheer anomalous nature protected him even from the wrath of an Ascendant.
A sense of exhilarating invincibility threatened to overwhelm Shiv's rational senses. The Harbinger asserted itself, preemptively purging arrogance before it could flower. "Your physical form remains the gate from which the Garden spreads. Remember it is trapped Backstage, outside of the System's full reach, and should your physical body be destroyed or struck by Longinus, your soul will suffer damage. Your skills will crack. You will break. The gateway will close. Do not let that happen."
The world bestowed additional credence on the Harbinger's words. One of Longinus' charges came a fist's distance away from running Shiv's real body through. Even being in the vicinity caused him to suffer harm, caused his soul to tremble and crack. Longinus' very presence inflicted an ablative pain. The Wanderer was a God of Exploration, and with that came distance traveled and separation of places. Everything around him was displaced bit by bit, the smallest part of one's flesh from the greater whole. His newest skill transformation didn't just make him capable of shredding through anything before him; it also made everything around him separate from its point of origin.
It was like the fundamental laws of reality around Longinus had been changed. To exist beside the Wanderer, one had to wander in all their parts and pieces, in mind, flesh, and the soul. And in that moment, Shiv's Continuity Error triggered of its own volition, not to pull him Backstage, but to bestow a vision. A Glimpse of Perspective sprang to life in tandem.
The Deathless glimpsed at Longinus at the peak of his form and power—a glorious unicorn that rode unbound from the limits of distance and dimensions. But rather than being a depraved, degenerate glutton who feasted on emotions and inflicted his pleasure on the unwilling, he was a colorful spirit—a glorious, carefree chevalier who enjoyed the pleasures of adventuring.
The vision lingered for an instant but felt like it lasted a lifetime. As the imprint faded, Shiv beheld what replaced it: a wretched husk, a rotten leftover of someone special; a marvelous hero.
And if the echoing screams of anguish that kept slipping out were any indication, the remnants of that someone were still there, trapped within himself.
To exist like that was a hell Shiv didn’t even want to imagine. Finishing Longinus off wasn't just justice for Georges and everyone he abused, but also mercy for the man the god used to be.
Shiv jumped his Harbinger a half-second more into the future. This time, his goal wasn't to strike at Longinus, but to guard his physical body from any harm. Instead, he used the Garden against Longinus—and to keep the incoming Fae at bay. As Shiv could control every wound that made up his ruinous armor, he rearranged his internal layout. The now mountainous Garden shifted and transformed much as Shiv did via his Eldritch Physiology skill. At the same time, his whips launched up into the air, swatting and blocking off legions of armored Bread-Knights teleporting into the scene atop mounts of sentient foodstuff.
Legion of Self proved its worth once more as Shiv guided every individual whip with unparted focus. Though a good twenty percent of his wound cape was dedicated to keeping the Princess's guards at bay, the rest of its collective tethers were unleashed upon a single foe. The Wanderer was a hard target to pin down, mainly because he moved without traveling through physical space at all. The world folded around him, shifted him from place to place without any transition in between. There was no intercepting him, there was just guesswork—and Shiv lacked any Divination Skill to predict where his enemy was going to appear next.
But quantity offered a quality of its own.
Thousands of wound-shaped whips speared through the Garden's insides. The sight was uncanny, like a tattered cape impaling its wearer through his thick suit of armor. The metaphor grew even stranger as the cape and the armor were technically made from the same substance. Things that were broken, things that should've been deleterious to the world, to materials, to the human body. As such, the whips passed through Shiv's exoskeleton of destruction like water meeting water. They melted through each other, merged yet existed separately. The whips were at once assimilated and intangible within Shiv, like a set of limbs one could use to reach into their own body.
The strangeness reached its crescendo as the Wanderer reappeared where one such whip existed. Its very presence flayed the rubble and wounds that made up the anomalous titan that Shiv wore, but part of the whips remained—absorbed injuries once inflicted by Longinus were turned back upon him. Absence wounds in existence became speartips. One such end passed through Longinus’ parting aura, for one could not displace a vacuum with a vacuum.
Reality wailed as it tore into Longinus, cleaving a clean strip through his divine flesh. A brutal gash ran along his sides; his equine form was flensed from sternum to flank, and the pain Longinus suffered was deep and true. A scream escaped the god, a scream that belonged to an upjumped mortal rather than a vaunted Divinity. Shiv had fractured him before by striking his demented mind and unbalanced emotions. But this was something else—for the first time, the absence projected by Longinus’ horn was turned upon him, and he proved no more immune to his own divine skills than any piece of matter.
The Ascendant wasn't the only thing that bled. As a spill of divine mana tainted the world, the vitality-infused membrane that stabilized Integration broke and burst as well. A cataclysmic manastorm was birthed within Shiv's Garden, and a wave of fire exploded outward, defined by the abstract characteristics of lightning. Forking bolts of flame spread through Shiv, setting his apocalyptic armor ablaze. He became a walking conflagration the size of a town, but this didn't hurt him either. It just nourished him more.
On top of that, beyond the levels he'd gained from fighting in this form, something settled upon him—a crown placed upon his brow by an almost reluctant hand of the System.
Garden of Wounds and Broken Things 107 > 109
Practicing Atheist (Legendary) - You have performed an act of unfaith, wounding a god using the powers of their very own Domain. Your insolence will not go unnoticed—or unrewarded. Your Magical Resistance has gained a new layering. Though the heavens might spit their edicts, you bear an apostate’s armor forged from your own deeds.
Feats [6/9]
The gifts that came with this new Feat manifested immediately. The Shapeless Tides that flowed across Shiv's form flared bright and burned a shade of dullest blue. An outer layering of armor formed over his soul, and suddenly all the unread Curses that the Princess of the Harvest had flung upon him earlier were dislodged at the cost of half his Overflow Tides.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Stray vectors vanished across Shiv’s body as he suddenly felt himself unburdened in ways he hadn't realized—but he didn’t stop to check what had changed. The Harbinger kept him focused.
And a good thing the skill did, for true death might have followed if he hadn’t reacted to what followed.
Though Shiv was imbued with resistance against the hands of the divine, it was tied to his Magical Resistance and thereby his Leviathan of the Shapeless Tides. But though the Garden of Wounds and Broken Things was an awesome skill in many respects, Shiv's vectors didn't circulate through it naturally. Instead, they were bound to his material form, which was also deprived of his full Magical Resistance potential without an Animated Skill Infusion.
As such, when Longinus finished his raging and shrieking, he charged again. This time, however, he did move; he commanded the world around him to drag the Garden away.
The world obeyed.
Existence folded like fabric, and even if the Garden and Shiv wanted to resist, they couldn't—for they were still subservient to the concepts of distance and spatial correspondence. At the same time, Longinus' horn became a prism, and he projected a beam of pure nothingness through the Garden, splitting it from its armored skull down to its chest, where Shiv's physical form resided.
And where his Harbinger, Severed Shadow, and friends made their stand.
The attack came faster than the team could react. Uva was the first to notice. She hadn’t been idle during the battle and had contaminated and gripped the minds of Longinus’ dimensionals and slaves. This allowed her to slot her stacks into more vessels, which further amplified her processing speed. She shouted a telepathic warning to Shiv. The moment he heard, he triggered Legion of Self.
But by that point, Longinus was already upon him, cleaving his vacuum tunnel downward, onto the spot between Shiv’s neck and left shoulder.
The attack struck. Something snapped inside Shiv. His Vitae cracked open as the warmth of his life essence spilled free; his Harbinger shattered ever more.
But he wasn't erased.
The pain was bad, but it was also manageable. Six out of ten, Shiv thought, mind accelerated beyond the constraints of time by his Legion of Self, and that realization invigorated him. I'm not dead. He didn’t break me. Not yet. Indeed, it was his Shapeless Tides that stopped the displacing powers possessed by Longinus. All of Shiv's vectors had been arrayed along that section of his torso, their tips pressed against an extended beam of nothingness that could be traced back to Longinus' lance-shaped horn. All of Shiv's remaining overflow tides were boiled away, and his innate vectors trembled to push the Ascendant back. He knew that, once his metaphysical protections were gone, nothing would hold the projected vacuum back from wiping away his physical form, like an eraser dragged over a pencil sketch.
And so, before that could happen, Shiv gripped the hollow beam with both hands and grappled with the god from afar.
Twin explosions of surprise went off inside him. Adam’s barely caught up to the situation; Uva’s thoughts went vacant with elated disbelief.
And she wasn’t the only one.
Shiv shook and let out a ragged cry of exhaustion. It felt like he was Pathless again and trying to bear the weight of a collapsing building on his back. But though the heaviness was bearing him down, his body was still holding it up. His vectors blazed in hues of midnight blue and vented blasts of waste mana into existence. A fiery lightning bolt strayed out from the mana storm pouring out inside Shiv’s Garden and skipped off his forehead.
The Deathless endured. If only for a heartbeat, beneath the powers of a god and mana rupture, he somehow held on.
"Shiv… how…" Adam gasped.
Shiv didn't even have the strength to reply. He did, however, have enough space to shrug Longinus' attack off to the side, just by a hand’s length. Just by enough that it missed his physical form. With a deafening roar, Shiv parried a god’s skill, sparing his soul from annihilation and the Garden from collapse.
Leviathan of the Shapeless Tides 540 > 548
Spots formed in his vision. His mind swarmed with utter fatigue, and thoughtlessness threatened to swallow him. Uva didn’t let him drown. She reached out and wrenched him back to awareness. "Endure!" Her words were buried in his psyche like a law, and he wouldn’t disobey. "Stand and finish the fight!"
It felt like she was lighting his mind ablaze from the inside out. It hurt, but it was a good kind of pain, an electric pain that woke him from the brink of blissful oblivion.
In that moment, he opened his eyes to behold Longinus staring at him from three hundred meters away. The Ascendant was gawking, and the fear chain between them was harder than ever. The Wanderer was consumed by utter disbelief, so strong that it tore apart his anger like a hurricane blasting a path between a forest fire.
“The fuc—” Longinus’s bark of disbelief broke into a scream as Shiv took advantage of the Ascendant’s lapse in focus. Over a hundred vacuum-tipped whips speared into him, turned him into a pincushion. More wounds opened across Longinus. He tried to blink away, but one of Adam's Shards of Exalted Flame smashed at him from behind, and this time Georges nearly snapped free. “NO!”
The Harbinger grew bright, and time came to a complete halt as Shiv launched himself forward. But even though he was still in the fight, his movements were anemic. Withstanding a blow from a god, even just deflecting it by a few centimeters, took almost everything he had. There were no overflow tides left to spend, and his innate strength had been sapped beyond what even his prodigious endurance could bear. If not for Uva forcing him to stay awake and Adam bolstering his soul far beyond his limits, Shiv would have sunk into a coma-like fugue—dead to the world, indifferent to his own fate.
"Mind, body, heart as one," the Harbinger rambled, clearly feeling his fatigue as well. "Where one crumbles, the other two will follow…”
A tidal wave of colors left Shiv's eyes. The Outside was being channeled out from him once more, and he barely even noticed. An ocean's worth of cartoon snakes jumped Longinus and began binding him with their own bodies.
The Wanderer, mauled from all sides and getting pierced further, was desperately pulling Georges back into himself, for a god couldn’t manifest in a dimension without a twin anchor: a Phylactery; an Avatar.
Phylactery. Avatar.
The Avatar was Georges. But the Phylactery…
"The Boiling Toad!" The Harbinger came to the conclusion before Shiv could sober from weariness. "This entire dimension is the conduit for his soul! This is his Perch!”
But in Shiv's mind, that revelation came second to the sight of Georges, trapped in a bubble of distended incandescence, writhing and struggling, trying to break free.
Something burned inside Shiv. He was beyond spent, but Georges was in danger.
And he couldn’t fail his father again. He couldn’t let him suffer or die again.
And where Shiv was empty of personal strength, he wasn't devoid of other skills either. Once more, the Garden came to his aid.
A riptide made from lacerations, punctured wounds, and broken streets slammed into him from behind. He'd used his Leviathan of the Shapeless Tides to protect his Garden. Now he used the Garden to carry him when his tides were spent.
Amidst a howling, world-rending mana storm, as arrows, vast strings of Psychomancy, time-freezing glaciers, and Outsider spawn bombarded the Wanderer, Shiv reached for his former mentor and concentrated the Unique blade of his cutting aura along his right arm. Please, please felling work!
He struck the bridge of divine mana connecting Georges to Longinus, and he cleaved deep into the magic with a silent scream.
Just not deep enough.
He was three-fourths of the way through when he came to a dead stop.
“Fuck! COME ON!” Golden mana sprayed out from the golden tether like a severed artery. Shiv gasped and choked, spending what fumes remained of his stamina before they could ever even become sparks again. He dug just a centimeter deeper before Longinus blinked once more.
This time, there was nothing left of Shiv’s Physicality or Magical Resistance to spare him from the Wanderer’s blow.
Georges vanished.
Longinus vanished.
They both reappeared, reunited, with the Ascendant’s horn buried through Shiv's chest.
Skill Damaged: Levia—
The world went dark.
Then the pain—and Uva’s cries—brought Shiv back to the waking world. A rattling chain of notifications spilled down his awareness like a waterfall, and even Shiv's incoherent state couldn't spare him from comprehending that almost every single skill he possessed had been torn asunder and shattered entirely by Longinus’ blow.
Besides his unreachable Unique Skills, he only had a handful left. The world blurred around him as he was dragged across existence. Space swirled and twisted as it moved, and suddenly Shiv found himself driven into the ground like a stake had been run through him.
All the air left his lungs. Blood spilled out of his mouth. The Harbinger fragmented—but held firm like a vase with its pieces lodged against each other.
Pressed against Shiv was Longinus, who was transforming back into his half-human form. Longinus, who was bleeding from so many gashes that he seemed more shredded meat than person, more torture victim than god. His transformation died down as he returned to his centaur-like state. It seemed that he couldn't maintain being a unicorn anymore—not with all the divine mana he'd lost, nor the psychosis that was taking hold as the shadowy fires of his heart tainted the waters of his mind.
But ultimately, what mattered was that there was still enough left of Longinus for him to take pleasure in this final victory.
“Heh… Finally… fucking got you… you little… little fuck. How’s it feel? Because this one is… is… Fuck…” The Ascendant whimpered as he gripped his mind. “You little fuck… got me… Got me good…”
Beyond Longinus, Shiv saw his Garden fall dormant and slowly recede. The many wounds and ruins that made up its body didn't collapse without a guiding mind. Instead, it was drawn back into its point of origin like a flower aging in reverse; every extension, every laceration, every crack along the asphalt was pulled back into the original seed—Shiv's broken physical body—before that form finally stabilized, and it dropped from the sky in pieces, dead for good.
Garden of Wounds and Broken Things 109 > 115
Inertial Overdrive 322 > 331
Harbinger of Tripartite Ruin 218 > 249
This Severed Shadow of Blood and Bladed Soul 239 > 265
Pillar of Orichalcum 408 > 422
Fae in their tens of thousands were descending from the light-spewing spatial wounds to the other dimensions within Plum Blossom’s necklace left in the sky, riding upon their steeds or carried by wings of their own.
Though worn and bloodied, the Wanderer was a cruel bastard, and so he took his opportunity. He relished his victory. He twisted his lance before lifting his hand, and Shiv rose, but found himself so spent he didn't even have the strength to scream at the agony. A swarm of cartoonish, feathered snakes and puppeteer strings assailed Longinus from all sides, but they failed to break through his divine body. With a casual swat on the back of his hand, he struck Shiv and delivered a blow that was equal parts psionic and emotional, one that threatened to turn the Harbinger into dust.
Shiv’s greatest Legendary Skill almost broke apart on impact—and barely held together as Adam cried out—giving every last bit of Heroism he could muster to keep Shiv from total annihilation. But the same could be said for Uva, who was battered free from Shiv’s body. She was tossed into the air—and speared through as Longinus summoned a lesser lance to nail her to the ground through the chest with a casual gesture.
Unlike Shiv, she still had enough left in her to howl. And howl she did.
Hearing that made something in Shiv snap. “Motherfu—”
Longinus drove his spear in deeper.
Two of Shiv’s three remaining skills burst apart and scattered within his soul. The only things he had left were…. were…
Writing (Common) 16
Continuity Error (Unique) 227
This Severed Shadow of Blood and Bladed Soul (Unique) 265
Garden of Wounds and Broken Things (Unique) 115
Almost nothing. Almost nothing left of him at all.
“Oh, that’s sweet. Were you about to go Berserk?” Longinus giggled hysterically, physically sucking in Shiv’s despairing rage and ragged breaths as he held him at eye level. “She’s something special to you, huh? Same thing with the bastard hiding inside of you.” He whistled. “Rand. Come out. I know how you are. I’m gonna fucking do things to them, and you’re not going to be able to just watch it happen. You’ll come out, you miserable, noble shit. You’ll let yourself get fucked because your heart can’t take it. I know you. Let’s just… skip to the good part.”
The Wanderer waited for a second, blinking erratically as he tried to catch his breath. But then, a change came over his expression. His face twitched. His form thinned. Shiv saw Georges inside him, crying, muttering pleas and words of near madness for this all to end. And then there was Longinus himself, who somehow looked even more wretched. “I… I…” The god within the man trailed off as he stared down at his hands, the lance still holding Shiv aloft. “Fuck… I'm so sorry… I'm so sorry… I'm trying, but it's just not enough. I know you did all you could, I'm not… I’m sorry… You tried… I tried… But it’s not enough… It's not…”
"Shiv," Adam whimpered, barely able to hold his friend's crumbling Legendary Skill together. "Get up! Get the fuck up! I can’t… Please, get up!"
Shiv tried to move. The pain sent him to the borders of unconsciousness in an instant. He was broken, and broken bad.
“I know you did all you could. I'm sorry. I know. I'm sorry.” Longinus' true self sobbed in anguish. “But I was stupid, stupid to think this wouldn't happen, that I wouldn't end up like this. I don't carry my own legend. I'm attached to someone else's. Of course their soul overrode my own. Of course I became a monster. Their story ate me… The story of the Great One… False stories… Every one more perverse than the other… Until now… Until this…”
“W-what?” Shiv coughed up bloody spittle. “What… are you—”
“Bitch! The fucking bitch!” Longinus wailed. “Kathereine! My fall should… Even with the degeneration, I shouldn’t be like this!”
Shiv blinked. He didn’t understand.
Longinus grabbed Shiv by the face and pulled him close. Shiv peered into his eyes, and what he saw was terror and hatred. “She… she degenerated first. And then she… she knew. She saw… And she… she whispered things to us. All of us. She made us do things and altered our worship and changed us… Until we were all… predictable. Lesser. Horrible things. Not ourselves.”
“Why?” Shiv whispered.
“C-control,” Longinus said, struggling against himself. Shiv saw his enkindled flames shift in his mind. This moment of lucidity was fading fast. “She wanted to… to be the… Didn’t want the Starhawk to be the one… to…” Longinus stopped talking, stopped crying, and his eyes went vacant.
Shiv tried to escape again, but he barely managed a twitch. "Adam… get the hells out of here…"
"No!" Adam cried. "I’m not leaving—"
"I’m broken," Shiv choked. "I’m done. Take Uva and go—" And as he was saying those words, his battered mind remembered something. "C-culturist? Y-you there?"
The Legendary orc didn’t reply. Took too long to reply, and when he did, it was with absolute strain. "Barely, Deathless. I hit level 501 in my Skill fifteen seconds ago. I can stave off the Delve momentarily, but there are seconds left in me. Perhaps half a minute."
"C-can you make it faster?" Shiv choked. "Because I need it to be faster."
The Culturist grunted. "I can. But be sure."
"No other choice," Shiv breathed. "Got one last—" His words died into a hissing snarl as the lance piercing his chest suddenly twisted.
A hitched chuckle escaped Longinus as he raised his head once more, the mania and hunger back in his eyes. “Sorry… Kinda… lost track there. Where were we?”
“P-please,” Shiv begged, looking away from the god. The act was equal parts performance and desperation. He couldn't let him pay attention to the others. “Please don’t.”
“Don’t?” Longinus asked innocently, as if he wasn't sure what Shiv was referring to. He leaned down in the most predictably depraved way a cruel son of a bitch might. “Don’t what? Don’t do this?” He slid his lance further in and then drew it out of Shiv a little and laughed as the Deathless contorted in silent agony. He pressed his face against Shiv's own and breathed right into his bloodstained mouth. “What the fuck does what you want matter? You’re mine now, Deathless.”
“Please don’t… Do what you want… Just don’t take… Don’t take my mind.” Tortured, shattered, scattered of thought, and on the verge of blacking out, this was the best bait Shiv could come up with. Without the Harbinger to guide him—himself on the verge of destruction—he didn’t have the complexity to muster anything more.
But the thing was, Longinus wasn’t far from breaking either—was already broken mentally.
And so he fell victim to himself one last time. The Wanderer snorted and drew back his face just slightly. “Shit. You want me to let you keep yourself, huh? Well. That’s unfortunate. Because I wanna wear you. I wanna know what it feels like when you are taught who you belong to, when I mark you deep.” And with that, Longinus pressed a hand on Shiv’s skull—cracking his Vitae even more—and projecting his godly mind magic into his suffering consciousness. “Shit. You got a hard mind there, Deathless. Good thing I like tough and hard mea—”
A few meters to the side, Uva's body was twisting and folding in alien geometries as she tried to pry herself free from Longinus’ lesser lance. But while one of her skills was broken as well and she was pinned in place, her Psychomancy strings weren’t attached to her by nature, and so one snaked out, connecting to Shiv from below the ground. "Shiv?"
"Link the fucker!” Shiv choked desperately. “Culturist! Delve!"
The orc sighed. "With… pleasure."
Longinus read those memories too late. He tried to draw back, let go of Shiv in panic, but a string of Psychomancy bridged him to Adam’s Awareness just as he tried to break away.
“You MOTHERFUCKING—”
He brought a hoof down on Shiv’s head just as Adam’s uncontrollable Haunting Omniscience washed over him.