Path of the Deathless

Deception is an essential aspect of war. More than merely being a skill, deception is going to be the core of all your engagements. You have things you can leverage: your strength, your magic, your numbers, your resources, positioning, geography, the capability of flight versus the possibility of tunneling beneath your enemies and collapsing the soil under their feet.

All these things can only be done and fully leveraged, however, if you have the right amount of information. If you are well informed and, on top of that, if you are provided with proper intelligence regarding your enemy's capabilities. And intelligence is essential, for what you don't know will often prove fatal. Assumptions on the battlefield will see you or your comrades slain, and that is not a trade. You are not trading lives for knowledge, because you will always run out of lives before you gain an adequate amount of information. You have to gain information beforehand, and so you have to be a better liar on the battlefield. You have to be able to bait your enemy into showing you their hand, their capabilities, their forces before you ever reveal your own.

And so the true dance of the battlefield takes shape before steel rings against steel, before spell collides upon spell. In battle, there is deception: two sides with a certain amount of knowledge, using that knowledge to learn more, to understand what they need to strike at, and filling the opposition with false information, feigning attacks, splitting their forces so that the enemy might find themselves diverted and made vulnerable. Detonating bombs behind enemy lines to force them to stay in place, running mock attacks repeatedly to wear down the enemy's attention, concentration, and morale. All things have deception built into their core; for the better liar always has an absolute advantage—the advantage of provocation. The advantage of initiative. The advantage of deciding where battles are to be fought, or breaking battles before they take shape.

And it is in understanding and mastering deception that you will spare your forces unneeded deaths and force your enemies to come forth to fight on your terms.

Remember this: Faced directly, a True Master is an impossible adversary for an Adept. They are near unbreakable for you in flesh, in magic, in all the ways that count. But if they do not suspect your presence, if they think they have your flank, and if they think they can access your flank only through a narrow valley that they traverse at night, then you can exploit this knowledge. You can use gravity to fill in where your skills are wanting. As they walk that valley, you wait. You watch, and you drop the stones down from above. And then, because they cannot be broken physically, you use another means of solving them. You soften the mud. You liquify the soil, and you press them into the earth where they have no leverage to push back, and so they suffocate. And so they drown, and they scream because they were not prepared. They were deceived, but you were not.

Understand that this is not an anecdote. This is how I killed my first True Master as an Adept. It can be done. Wield your mind and use your enemy's paranoia and knowledge against them.

If you can command their expectations, if you can command their perception of the world and shape it to your whim, then even if you are inferior in all other aspects, you can determine the conditions of victory.

—Captain Harry Irons, TacStrat 101, Phoenix Academy

409

The One Who Decides [II]

It took only eight minutes for Uva to conquer Passage this time, with three of those already spent testing and acclimating to her new skill before she initiated her attack.

The Dreaming Storm was a many-layered blade, and she learned to wield it well as she experimented on this simulated world and the people that populated it. The weakest of her enemies were spirited away, snatched in an instant by fingers of lightning that curled and spread, becoming a doubled analogue of storm and web. She stole them from where they were, leaving their allies shocked and terrified, before storing them in secured territory, where she could use them as mana generators to amplify her power.

Rather than ripping through Passage using overwhelming means, however, she went further. She reconstructed the insides of the teleportation complex, and her Psychomancy was unleashed as more than a thing of raw and brutal power. It was an intrusive layering atop reality, a distortion of the actual world, forged through her magic. Her Dreaming Storm spread to swallow all of Passage, and within the halls, doors vanished. New hallways were created. Paths linking one place to another were constructed in an instant as the architecture of her mind subsumed the architecture of reality. Beneath her mana, the actuality of existence remained rooted, but for this moment, while her translucent rains fell, her will was paramount, and she reshaped architecture and geometry to her whims.

Such was why she abandoned the subtle approach. She wanted responders to arrive from the rest of Weave. She wanted powerful Pathbearers to step into this reconstructed reality she'd built over Passage. And they did. Unknowingly, they walked into Uva's storm, into her web, and didn't even realize—a coming swarm of flies laying themselves out as a gathered feast for a spider to sample.

With the laws of the mind taking precedence over the laws of matter, Uva applied the lessons Hymn had taught her and continued instructing herself as she stole away core memories and used them to create a maze built on the foundations of madness and misery.

The resources used to construct the maze were freely provided by all her victims, and she approached every battle with a similar strategy. The weakest weren't worth killing or bending to her will; they provided far more of a strategic and tactical advantage as amplifiers for her mind. As she accrued the vulnerable, her storm grew. A pall of translucent lightning spread over the skies of Weave, drowning the city below in kaleidoscopic flashes of eldritch radiance.

But the creeping storm belied something hidden, something subtle. The rains that fell were gradually reshaping the shape of reality. Passage was already transforming, twisting, but ever so slowly, ever so subtly, the rest of the city was beginning to follow. It began in places no one was looking, barren of Awareness. She created bridges to these places, planting doors on walls where there were none before and connecting them back to Passage, back to where her own body remained.

Landscapes derived from harvested memories became junctions between locations. Uva installed childhood bedrooms across bioluminescent fields, and burning battlegrounds as connective tissue for her new reality. And she did it with the ease of weaving immaterial thoughts.

After all, beneath her unceasing downpour, there was no difference between matter and mind.

She exploited the spontaneously created pathways, storing her Terrorspawn and spiderlings within the psionic bridges to serve as spontaneous breach points across the city—before removing them from her mind and existence the moment after to ensure her enemy couldn’t trace her back.

This allowed her to engineer impossible encirclements and effectively remove the limitation of space and distance, at least within the reach of her mana field—which was quite considerable indeed. With every mind she stole, it swelled and grew larger, and everything beneath its shadow was hers to manipulate.

A series of absurd battles followed. Terrorspawn, spiderlings, and magical spells exploded out from portals and chasms that weren't there before, washing over her Heroic and Legendary adversaries one after another.

The Order fought well, resisting as hard as they could, just like before, but they had no counter for her most esoteric Psychomancy. More than creating bridges, she sealed away existing paths, cutting allies off from each other, isolating Legendary Pathbearers so that they could drown beneath a tide of her Outsider minions and her combined skills.

The Cherished Mother in charge of Passage was struck down without a fight this time, as she failed to notice the ground beneath her opening up and Uva's elongated hand spearing high through that psionic breach point, piercing through her chest and cleaving her open down the middle.

As the first encounter ended and the second followed, scenes like this played all across the city, one after another, and Uva never slowed her tempo. She always engaged at her own volition. Where her storm fell, where the rains accumulated, she built her reality and substituted that which existed before. A second web grew within Weave, one that was closer to its namesake. Threads of psionic essence glowed bright as the familiar spires and skylines vanished beneath kaleidoscopic veins of lightning that pulsated with fractured spiderlings.

The metaphor of a spideress was no longer enough. Uva wasn't just a spider. She had merged into her own web, and her nest was ever-growing, ever-tangled with captured minds and slain adversaries. As she captured four thousand mana generators, she stole entire spires out of reality, taking with those colossal towers everyone trapped within. Once more, she seized the weak and assimilated their minds, but she left the strong behind and ground them down through concentrated battles of attrition, never letting them join up with one another. Always hounding them, hunting the Dimensionalists, the Diviners, and the enemy Psychomancers first, for they were the ones that dealt the most damage to her new invasive architecture. It wasn't enough. It was never enough.

Slowly, a third metaphor entered the fray: Uva was more than a web. She was a sea pouring forth from a hostile reality this version of Weave was destined to drown.

And through it all, Uva found a most applicable use for Harkness as well, as she deployed her forces in hybrid warfare, dispatching her Terrorspawn as an expendable vanguard, delivering calculated strikes through her spiderlings, or interceding herself when things were most dire. Harkness, though, gained a special role in all that. Harkness became a spoiler.

“You bitch, you Umbral whore, you blood slave, you little—” Harkness's harpy-like screeches were cut off time and again as she was manifested in the most hostile areas. Beneath the hail of enemy spells, she would disintegrate in moments. Whenever the mana comprising her body was utterly spent, death came to greet Harkness.

Except not really. Shiv was no longer the sole holder of the Deathless title.

This stolen instance of Harkness' consciousness got to experience end after end as she was flung into the deep end, luring the enemies out, distracting the Order, and befuddling them as they found themselves killing the same woman over and over. This revealed more of their capabilities, their most stealthy assets, and allowed Uva to understand and devise devastating strategies toward their resolution.

“And it's all thanks to you, Harkness,” Uva declared with a slight smirk pulling at her lip. “Your sacrifices will be remembered by me, and I will reward you by sending you on new missions, just like New Albion. Why, I'm practically your new queen, aren't I?”

Harkness tried to seethe, but that was a bit difficult when a twelve-meter-tall Weaveress clad within armor sculpted from storm and stone had her arm through her chest. “Someday, someday my true self will visit my revenge upon you,” she spat through their mental connection. “Someday I will see you butchered for this indignity.”

“Well, be sure to regret this someday. But not today. For right now, I need you in the southwestern part of the city. The Pyromancer there has burned away all my Terrorspawn, and I need to take another run at her. Do scream as loud as you can. She doesn't like loud noises.”

“Mettabon!”

But Uva considered the conversation done, and so she cast Harkness away, projecting a new instance of her ego with the thunderclap of falling lightning, as her last form was spent. A satisfied sigh escaped Uva. Arteries of translucent lightning erupted forth from her head, and her powers only grew as other branching storms were installed nearby. No longer was she in the anchor anymore. She stood in the central lobby of Passage, but she had also significantly moved and layered that final sanctuary of hers deep beneath other hallways, dense mazes, and other interwoven architecture. Behind her stood rows and rows of mana generators, captured victims with strands of lightning hooked into their minds. Smaller storms burst out of them, were drawn away into Uva's Dreaming Storm, and all that power was fed back into the greater architecture at play—that subversive reality growing over the existing city like a cancer.

“Such a shame I can only deploy one instance of her through my Black Gnosis,” Uva mused. “I think I need to consume more minds—the stolen egos aren't exactly useful in combat, but I can continue expending them, and they are worth a wealth of experiences. Besides, disposable assets are hard to come by, and piling in pure psionic recreations of people requires too much concentration. Unless you have more advanced strategies you would like to share?”

She regarded the Headmaster and saw the man on the verge of open schadenfreude.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“Again, though this is incredibly amusing, I do need to remind you that you made an oath about ethics and all that before,” Hymn said. “What you're doing with her is awfully close to slavery. Frankly, a claim of slavery can still be made for all the people you have captured and fueling your telepathy.”

“And an argument can be made against it. Harkness is not actually Harkness. She is just a distilled ego that I am imagining. I can't make myself a slave, or I am utterly my own slave. Either way, I do not think the ethics apply here, not in the same way as with the others…” Uva looked over her shoulder and scanned the pawns fueling her Dreaming Storm. “I suspect 'prisoners of war' would be more accurate. I'm not forcing them to do anything; I'm simply deriving an extra resource of power from them. Is that entirely ethical? I suspect not, but nothing about Psychomancy is, and I refuse to surrender what remains of my pragmatism to dignify my enemies when they might not give me any in return.”

“Some might argue you're playing with semantics, Seeker.”

“Some are System-favored,” Uva shot back. “Some have not faced a very probable prospect of being ambushed by a Tarrasque or a pantheon of hostile gods.”

Hymn just rolled his eyes. “So long as you can justify it to yourself, I suppose.”

“Are you mocking me?”

“Now, I do find your ethics questionable, but I suppose since you're just starting out, these things are inevitable. Besides, I'm not the most moral person myself, but I do mean that. Your behavior determines who you are, and if you can maintain some level of behavioral consistency, fewer vulnerabilities will arise from that psychologically. Action mirroring mind and all that. I wrote a book on that a few decades before you were born. You might be interested in reading it.”

Uva glared at the projection of the man standing opposite her. “I've read several books on this subject. My education is—”

“Let me kill your hubris before it swells. A Pathbearer’s education is never complete. The thing about enlightenment is that it's not a skill, but a perpetual deficiency.”

Hymn spoke with a seriousness Uva had never sensed before, and so she was compelled to listen. “I've noticed a few flaws in you. Not in your power. The problem is that you're flippant about many things, not due to arrogance but because you don't like dealing with them. You compartmentalize your discomfort, and you push it aside. You do that for pretty much everything, in fact. Right now, because you still hold some spite toward the surface in your heart for what one of us has done to you, you turn away from possible knowledge. You don't need to like us. You don't need to respect us. Someday, if you decide to wipe us all out, then it is what it is. But understand that turning away from knowledge is a mutilation of yourself. Enlightenment is a hopeless, vain pursuit, but it is a worthy pursuit nonetheless.

He snapped his fingers. “Learn. Learn everything. Do not let ignorance betray you. I can't stand to see that more than anything else. I can't stand to see the tragedy of a fool refusing to learn.”

And for one of the rare moments in her life, Uva listened to him and nodded once. “I'll read your book after all this is done. No need to push it any harder. Just leave me a copy after we get out of this place.”

“A copy?” Hymn repeated. “Uva, dear, you are going to be reading through libraries' worth of books if I’m going to make a proper Seeker and Psychomancer out of you.”

He watched her as if waiting for a desired response, and then pouted when she just kept a deadpan stare. “Usually when I threaten to increase the workload of my students, they whine and beg.”

Uva wiggled her nose in disdain. “How pitiful. Is the library large?”

“Quite.”

“Good.” And Uva said no more.

Hymn’s nonchalant facade cracked as he laughed. “Ah, well, this is going to be a welcome change of pace. Someone who is actually willing to learn. Well, then, before all those textual lessons, another lesson in the practical. I already told you about creating architecture using your mind. Well, since the laws of matter and mentalism are blurring, understand that the rules of space don't fully apply anymore, either. It's a strange little trick that trespasses slightly into the realm of Dimensionality—but bypasses that lore since you're manipulating things Psychomantically.”

“You're talking about making spaces smaller or closer together telepathically, like I'm doing right now.”

“Yes, but with more focus. With more deliberate thought.” A rumble of psionic lightning interrupted Hymn’s words as sixty-five more Adepts were lowered into the lobby with bolts hooked into their minds. The total mana Uva commanded grew ever greater. “Packing all your generators in one place, for instance, is a bad idea, even if you can easily move them. As I mentioned before, you're not actually a Dimensionalist, and as such, you can't prevent one from teleporting in here.”

Uva hummed in consideration. “A decentralized defense… Yes, I understand. I can apply that.”

“Let me finish completely. A decentralized architecture: a decentralized city. You don't want to give your enemies any clear targets. You want their experiences to be miserable, more than just wandering into a maze. You want them to never truly hit you. You need to occupy some space in reality. You can't simply pull everything into your own mind. The city is too much, even with all its inhabitants fueling you with mana. But you have more than enough magic right now to layer different places together using your mind—to use the dynamic nature of your thought to keep you constantly in transit.”

As Uva drank in the Headmaster's words, a growing understanding passed through her. “You mean we don't need to be inside Passage? I should shuttle us from place to place within a bolt of lightning, or use my thoughts to constantly move myself and my most important assets through the bridges you taught me to make?”

Hymn gave a slight nod. “That's part of what I'm saying: be dynamic, be flexible, be fluid, be like water. If you can constantly move, you already have zone control, so use the zone. Never be where your enemy is about to hit, and constantly maneuver. In fact, you can reshape this mental projection you have of the city, so you can move through this place in ways no one else can. Here's the part where you start exploring and stop theorizing.”

Uva took a second to calibrate her mind, transitioning herself and all of her generators out from within the heart of Passage, which was going to be quite the undertaking. Or maybe it didn't need to be. Everything around her was layered in a coating of mind mana anyway. All she needed to do was inject this portion of mind mana somewhere else.

She wasn't actually pulling chunks out of reality. Aside from a few pieces of matter that she stole into her mind and cast aside, or a few buildings she ripped away from where they once stood, she wasn't actually displacing or damaging the actual material integrity of the world.

So, instead of drowning everyone within the lobby in a massive swell of falling lightning, moving them back into her mind and performing the transition herself, she created a great many portals lining the walls and simply chose one to walk through. A few seconds later, all her mana generators passed into other areas as well, and then they kept walking. More doors constantly opened in front of them as her psychomancy bridged and built connections across the city; they never stopped moving. They never stopped changing locations.

Thus, her most important assets gained a new layer of dynamic protection.

By now, all of Weave was in shadow beneath her storm, and the lightning she cast forth hammered the last patches of defiance. But even that didn't last long. Far fewer people died during her struggle to claim the city. Far fewer, indeed. She possessed 12,000 minds under her sway this time, 12,000 that made her power so much greater than before. She wasn't just a raw storm anymore. All those minds provided her with more stolen architecture to implant over the city, and so the shape of Weave changed as well. As the storm fell, as the rain rebuilt the spires and crystalline heights, aglow in ethereal lights, they were replaced by literal embodiments of Weave's name: a spider web took shape, a spider web of translucence clutching shards of fractal brilliance in the denseness of its webbing, hiding armies of moving spiders, connecting chunks of toppled buildings.

It was a city engulfed in ruin. It was a city lost to strands spun by Uva's mind. It was a city layered in mana, hiding so much in its depths; it was a city that became a trap for anyone that dared descend into its madness.

The third encounter arrived.

Adam wasn't.

Twelve thousand minds channeled in concert struck him from existence even faster than previously, and Uva only unleashed a fifth of all the magic she'd amassed this time.

The fourth encounter came, and Shiv crashed down, but Uva had adapted her strategies in advance.

Last time, he caught her off guard, overwhelmed her by smashing and ripping through her mana generators, forcing the battle into one of near-desperate attrition until she finally solved his puzzle. This time, she was the puzzle, and he found himself bereft of any keys.

Clad in his Garden of Wounds and Broken Things, Shiv came crashing down with an overflowing sea of Shapeless Tides, expecting to blast through spires bedecked with captured minds. In the first second, he plunged into the webbing, slamming against bolts of dormant Psychomancy—bolts that detonated with power, straining Uva's collective mana and draining her by half her reserves. But they held, and while it sapped her, the lightning burned away at Shiv as well. She unleashed her spiderlings en masse, their built-up numbers slicing and slashing upon him, and fleeing across psionic bridges the next moment.

As his scar-forged shell manifested, she didn't continue striking him physically. She sent forth her Terrorspawn; they died as expected. Harkness was launched; she died as well. But in that carnage, as Shiv thrashed, trying to break something, he found himself deprived of any nourishing destruction.

Wherever he rampaged, Uva used her Psychomancy to strip the site bare of matter. The individuals she used as generators, meanwhile, simply continued walking and walking and walking. The bridges took them from alleyways to storefronts to offices, and then bedrooms. Never once did they come within forty kilometers of Shiv's person.

While he was a self-sustaining engine of destruction, indestructible, unstoppable, and undying in most circumstances, right now, in a direct contest of magical attrition, he was being ground down. Everything she lost would soon be regained and surpassed as she harvested more lightning from her captured minds, while he had no way to generate anything but innate tides.

Even so, killing Shiv took the better part of three and a half minutes. She had to play a dangerous game against his Unique Pyromancy, that flame which cooked her mana and allowed him to gorge himself on the substance of her power. This time, as he ate away at her stuff, he developed a layer of translucence all his own and started walking through her webbing, like he was a part of its substance. She adapted then, bombarding him with her time-halting frost—and only after he ripped through ninety percent of her psionic webbing, depriving her of the vast majority of her mana reserves, did she finally bring him down and entomb him within a massive pillar of tarnished gold.

By now, the cityscape of Weave had been reshaped. Beside the Symposium, everything at the core of the dimension had been harvested bare, standing as a curved, empty bowl of translucent webbing, with a single spire born of time and frost standing at its center. The Deathless within struggled a few seconds more before he went still, trapped in stasis, effectively defeated.

With that, the final encounter drew close once more, and a long breath escaped Uva. Despite what she was about to face, the enormity of the task, and the danger of the adversary awaiting her, she felt a lightness fill her body as she observed Shiv through the eyes of her spiderlings, through Harkness, whom she dispatched onto him without any concern.

Not a single mana generator was lost this time. Not a single life held by Uva's web. Though the roiling storm above was weakened, the many branches leading up into the sky continued to flow, and soon the lightning would return en masse, and the rains would follow. Her generators, her minds, her pawns were the most important aspect of this skill. She wasn't the only source of mana that she could wield—Uva was strongest when an entire city was working with her, when her mind was supported by countless others.

And that had her thinking once more. About using her powers with the consenting city, with Gate Piety or the real Weave. Instead of trying to conquer her home, she could bridge it, connect it, fuse the collective consciousnesses and intellects of her Sisters and Mothers together. What could she do then? What wonders could she bring about if the System would only give her a few moments of reprieve?

This Legendary skill was a gift above gifts. It wasn't just for war. It wasn't just to enslave. No, it was beyond that. It was synergy. It was the meaning of community. It was a dream. A dream shaped as a storm.

“And it can be more than that,” she breathed. “I can reach beyond Weave. With this, we don't need to hide inside the Composer’s dimension anymore. We can expand. The First Blood, Compact, even the Legions and the Descenders… I can see them denied. I can drive them to the brink.” Uva reached out to all twelve thousand minds synchronized with her Dreaming Storm—and dubbed them as such for good. Because that was what they were synchronized to: her mind, her power. They were synchronized to a dream, and in fueling that dream, they allowed it to become a higher part of reality.

“Calm, calm.” Hymn gestured for Uva to focus. “You still have one encounter left. A critical, dangerous encounter. And aside from that, I'm going to warn you right now that I felt the same way when I finished my Delve. Like I'd just learned what it meant to be a god. No, more than a god. I'd achieved a true apotheosis.” Slowly, he shook his head and tutted in criticism of both himself and her. “But of course I hadn't. My power is great. It grants me insights few other Legends can match, and yours, well, it's special and powerful and utterly, infuriatingly unique, because the System lusts for and despises you in equal measure. But know this: You are nowhere near invincible. The most important memories to hold on to are memories of defeat, not memories of triumph. Remember how easy it was for Adam to strike you down, and understand that he can still strike you down that easily if you give him an opening. Again, you are not a Dimensionality; you don't hold power over spaces; you're simply circumventing it.”

His words slowly pulled her back from her reverie, and she waited for him to continue. “Likewise, if you were actually fighting Shiv, things wouldn't be so easy. It would be substantially harder for him than Adam to take you down since he lacks more esoteric abilities, but so do you. He didn't wander out of reality while facing you. He hasn't used his words or leapt across time. I don't know about the forces of your city in detail, but I assume the same is true for them here. The Delve is difficult, but it is also engineered for you to experience final success, and the same will go for the Hatchling. I suspect that you'll find a way to solve it now. I'm not going to tell you how to defeat it. I am, however, going to infuse it with the Stranger's essence, because I can cheat if the System can. We can, to be accurate. But I expect you to best it on your own, using what little you've learned so far. When you do, when you decide what you want to do with it, when you make your first true choice about the eldritch instead of a choice forced upon you, I want you to hold this point and all the other points you struggled with in mind.”

“So that I'm not swallowed by hubris?” Uva guessed.

“So you can help the truth sink in as deeply as it can go. Being a Legend does not make you truly powerful. It simply makes you truly aware of how mortal and vulnerable we all are, because there are other Legends who have gone through worse Delves than you—and there's definitely at least one that’s perfectly designed to kill you.”

Initiating Encounter (5/5)

And once more, the Composer’s cocoon below burst apart in a blinding explosion of divine fire, revealing the Hatchling and the Starhawk’s golden shadow looming over it.

“Food for thought,” Hymn hummed. “But while you digest that, enjoy dessert in the form of the Eldest. Let's see how badly you can humiliate an Outsider god.”

“Yes,” Uva hissed through her teeth, a cruel need to settle a score roaring to life within her. “Dessert indeed.”

It had been some time since she felt quite so hungry.