100 (II)

Cremation

But still, Shiv thought, I should develop more skills. Disease Resistance showed me something. You can get a lot out of new skills. A single-skilled Hero is not nearly as effective as a ten-skilled Master in terms of options. Or even capability. I need to be more than just a brute. Or a bomb. And he regarded his Deepest Edge next, along with his Whip Proficiency, Dread Aura, Silver Tongue, and more… Maybe a social skill too. Silver Tongue has been neglected. I shouldn’t just use it to spit funny quips at Uva. It can do more. Just like Angelo’s Charm.

As he touched down at the heart of Hawthorne, he looked at the lone cathedral and shook his head in disgust. True to what he’d seen earlier, there were hundreds of flayed bodies draped around its front. And he didn’t notice a large tarp made from human skin drifting off by the side. It was connected to the cathedral too, and the vampires had been doing something vile there, growing creatures from the people. Blood Horrors, if Shiv could judge correctly.

A few badly grown Blood Horrors lay at the bottom of a pit, their bodies consumed by teratoma, jutting hairs sticking out from clumps of bone, teeth, mangled tissue, and more. They were parodies of people, parodies of even monsters. And compared to the Court Leviathan, they were positively ugly. It wasn’t that the First Blood couldn’t make something beautiful in aesthetic, it was just that the Blood Horrors they created were monsters, pure and to the bone.

The rest of the town was awash in blood. The residences had disconnected bits of biological tissue inside them. His over 200 meter wide Biomancy field told him that a good deal of that was human flesh. Very badly mutilated human flesh. Some of the limbs were too small. The bodies were too small. He retracted his mana from them. He didn’t want to know.

Even if he was immune and resistant to trauma, there were some things he didn’t want to dream about. Besides, he had to harden his heart for the horrors that awaited him in the silo. And he knew that whatever he found inside there would make him hate the First Blood even more.

As he got closer to the silo, he heard a loud crash as the side of the wall shook. Shiv gritted his teeth and prepared to go in. His mind spun, but he remembered Angelo. It wouldn’t be surprising if the rogue vampire decided to go in to free his own people during the chaos. The silo was a tall, cylinder-shaped building with a blood-splattered entrance at the very front. Shiv could still see the trail of blood left by the badly mutilated corpse of a child once held in the grasp of a high vampire leading out from it.

He wished he could sort out which high vampire that was so he could take his time with the bastard. But, truth be told, they likely disintegrated along with a few thousand Blood Horrors during Shiv’s frequent detonation of his inertial sheath. Again, he needed to be more calculated, more careful. Uva could have probably found and isolated the one responsible, and Adam too. Now, some measure of revenge escaped Shiv simply because he was too blunt.

Focus, Shiv thought to himself. I need more focus too. And I need to level my Awareness.

He drew in a breath, and he let his creeping void flood out from him. The world was subsumed in the darkness, and Shiv became the only man with any eyes in that miasma. He struck the door of the silo, bending it inward. The steel screamed and tore before his might, but as he entered, Shiv caught sight of the nightmarish hell within.

And that stopped Shiv dead.

It was like a slaughterhouse taken straight from a nightmare. Naked bodies were hanging—The First Blood had fused them together, limbs jutting out inhumanly, limbs too small to belong to adults, but parts inside their flesh too large to…

“Fuck,” Shiv choked out, the bile rising up his throat.

It took a lot to shake Shiv, it really did, but the First Blood managed posthumously. His mind reeled. He pulled his helmet off and violently emptied the contents of his stomach all over the ground.

“Godsdamned… felling monsters,” he growled after almost half a minute of heaving. He slammed the bottom of his left hand into the side of the silo, and part of it curved inward with a loud shriek. After a few moments of composing himself, he gritted his teeth and walked back in. He tried to keep his eyes on the ground—tried to ignore what had been done to the people here. But he couldn’t ignore Angelo, who was kneeling at the center of the silo, loudly sobbing.

The rogue vampire held something, something far too small, in his arms. Shiv tried not to look at it. He tried not to look at the woman that lay not far away from Angelo. There were so many meticulous cuts all over her body that Shiv groaned as he forced his bile back down. For a moment, he felt his mind begin to reel, but then it reasserted itself. As it always did.

“Angelo,” Shiv said. He looked to his right, and he saw a Blood Horror pinned to one of the walls, a pitchfork lodged in its chest. It was dead. That was likely the bang Shiv heard earlier: Angelo impaling it against the wall. From the ceiling, things dripped down, blood and other substances. Shiv didn’t look up. Shiv didn’t want to look.

“It’s my fault. It’s my fault. It’s my fault,” Angelo muttered over and over again. He was shaking. His claws remained transformed, sharp blades instead of soft nails. He gently laid the small thing he was holding onto the ground, and then he clawed at himself, leaving deep gashes in his face.

“Angelo,” Shiv repeated. “Stop. Stop.” The vampire lowered his bloodied hands and closed in on himself. He wasn’t even crying anymore. He was catatonic, his open eyes looking at nothing. “I… knew all these people. I met them. During my time with the First Blood, I met them. I struggled. I… I was… The First Blood made me do things. They made me meet people and I… I finally—I managed to make connections and and, and…” Angelo babbled incoherently, but Shiv got the gist. He didn’t realize that a vampire’s mind could even crack and break like this. But, now that it had happened, there was only one thing to do.

“Alright, I guess I’m gonna have to introduce you to my girlfriend too if I’m taking you with me,” he muttered. But before that, he steeped himself, looked at the bodies all around, and grimaced. “I don’t think we should just leave them out here. Angelo, you said you knew these people, right?”

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Angelo slowly stopped shaking. The vampire rose. He turned to stare at Shiv, and Shiv immediately turned his attention away.

“Yes,” Angelo breathed, “and it’s my fault.”

“No,” Shiv said, interrupting him. “But we can argue about that later. Right now, what you need to do is bury them or do something else for them. It’s not right if we just leave them out there, just hanging like this.” It took a moment for Shiv’s intentions to sink in, but a little thereafter, Angelo nodded.

“Yes… Yes.” And his eyes widened as his pupils dilated. “Wait, the Court Leviathan! It’s still out there!”

“It is,” Shiv said, “but it’s mine now.”

Angelo clearly didn’t process Shiv’s words. “What do you mean?”

“I killed all the vampires inside of it. And out. The vampires were shit. They deserved worse.”

“What? All of them?” Angelo whispered. “But how? The Court Leviathan, it carries an entire court, an entire generation of…”

“Yeah,” Shiv said, nodding. “Guess I killed an entire court then. And frankly, aside from the Leviathan and maybe one or two of them, they weren’t that impressive. I guess they were here to take a Compact gate. The gate me and mine already took. They were probably here to support an army of bloodsuckers too. Of course, that army’s not there anymore either. They also started boasting about this Hero, but well, I already killed him a while ago. So, I don’t think this court has anything on me. But I do thank them. That Leviathan, pretty cool creature. I like its plagues.”

Angelo was just staring at him. “You are… You must be truly favored. A True Hero.

Shiv snorted at that. “A Low Hero, actually. But favored like you wouldn’t believe. Frankly, if I take you with me, you might come to hate me for it.”

“I cannot,” Angelo whimpered. “I do not believe I possess the capacity to hate anyone but myself.”

“Right. Well, you’re going to save that for after we handle these bodies. So, fire or burial?”

Angelo stared at Shiv. “Fire. After what has been done to them, I think they would want fire.”

And Shiv lifted a hand. A paltry flame danced upon his palm. “Well,” Shiv said with a sigh. “One of my weakest skills, but I think it will be enough.”

***

Pyromancy 8 > 9

Skill Gained: Psychology 1 (Common)

Shiv did get a level for Pyromancy, but he also gained another skill he didn’t expect. He looked on at the Psychology skill. He wasn’t sure why he got that. Maybe it was from considering Angelo’s mental state. Maybe it was from all the self-rumination he’d been doing in the middle and between the bloodshed. Regardless, more skills were always welcome. But Psychology, much like Philosophy, was a strange skill to gain. He wasn’t sure where they might lead or how their evolutions and potential fusions would change them.

You don’t know? Rose asked from within. Her voice was soft. Her presence, however, was growing stronger. She’d only just recovered, just put herself back together completely after the Recollector’s assault from earlier. She still felt fragile in a way, but her presence was intact. How can you not know? All children experience their first Skill Evolutions around their graduation days from the Rudimentaries.

“I didn’t get to have a Pre-Academy—no Rudimentary for me,” he replied, speaking quietly to himself.

You didn’t? No. How? Your skill?

“It turns out that when your parents murder a certain Town Lord’s wife and sacrifice her baby daughter in a ritual, they don’t tend to like you, and no one takes you in. No one but a chef with a terrible attitude.” Shiv spoke without rancor, but there was still a bit of bitterness in his voice. He had focused on getting rid of it. The way he saw things now, it didn’t matter anymore. He was a Pathbearer, and he’d caught up to the others—more than caught up, he’d shot further than most Pathbearers would in their entire lives.

He had no room to complain. Well, that’s a lie. He had every reason to complain. But not to Rose. Besides, it just didn’t matter.

The System wanted him to fight. It didn’t care if he suffered, it didn’t care who died, and it didn’t care about the weak. It only cared about those who threw themselves against death time and time again, only to come out on top. Or to be a footnote in someone else’s story.

Is that all these people are? Shiv wondered. He looked at the massive, crackling bonfire he had started in the town square.

So many bodies he gathered. So many bodies he cleaned alongside Angelo. So many bodies now burning, now embers to the wind. He didn’t know their names. He didn’t know their lives. He had no memory of them. But hearing the vampire cry beside him was bad enough. Shiv, on some level, was glad he didn’t know them. He was also glad he hadn’t been hurt very badly thus far.

Guardshead Leu had been killed in an instant. Crushed. Murdered in front of his eyes. He wasn’t able to save her. That felt terrible enough, but he hadn’t known Leu very well. He had considered what might happen within himself if he saw Uva die. If he saw Adam die. Just the thought made his gut twist. It twisted even more violently than when he threw up earlier. It twisted so hard that he let out a growl of dismay. Angelo briefly eyed him, but went back to muttering under his breath, saying prayers for the fallen.

Shiv’s mind would return to baseline. He knew that he wouldn’t break, not for long, not for good. That, he was sure about. But would he still be himself afterward? He thought not. The pain of loss, of losing someone. That was more than just a feeling. That was more than just trauma. It was an absence in your life. It was like a permanent bit of sadness inside of you. Sadness didn’t break people, he believed. Sadness just changed them. And it was a change Shiv never wanted to experience. But as he promised himself that he would never let anyone he cared about fall, that he would always support them, a cold feeling began to well up in the bottom of his gut. A cold feeling he couldn’t ignore.

Outside Context Problem almost triggered then, but it went quiet.

And Rose let out a sigh instead. I think, she began hesitantly. But then she gathered her resolve. I think we need to talk about many things. My mind is still a swirl of chaos. But I remember fragments from my life. And we must talk. We must. You’ve ignored me long enough.

“I haven’t ignored you,” Shiv said, a surge of heat entering his voice. Then he tempered it. “I haven’t. I just don’t know how to deal with you. Alright? Now, if you didn’t notice, there’s a lot of other terrible shit happening every second, every moment. The System’s probably going to throw another group of dragons at me now that I survived this. Or maybe New Albion is coming in this direction with a second and third army that I’ll need to fight off. I’ve got a lot to deal with. And frankly, I’d rather keep fighting than deal with you.” He realized how it sounded at the end. And so, he kept talking. “It’s… I don’t have a problem with you. I don’t even know you. And I don’t know how you ended up inside me, alright?”

“Who are you talking to?” Angelo asked, staring at Shiv.

“No one,” Shiv said. “Ghosts. Maybe like you are now, muttering to the dead.”

The rogue vampire eyed him. His gaze was filled with withheld tears that he refused to let fall. But as he drew in a breath, he asked Shiv another question. “Does your ghost speak to you?”

Shiv hesitated. He didn’t know how to respond to that. But as he thought, eventually the truth came out. “Yeah,” Shiv said, “and I don’t know what to say to them.”

“I envy you,” Angelo replied softly. “I would give anything to hear from some of my ghosts. Anything.”

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