100 (III)

Cremation

For a while, they just watched the bodies burn. The smell was foul, but better the taste of flame and cooking flesh than whatever vile stench the First Blood left behind. As Angelo stared on, Shiv moved on to the rest of the town. Many of the houses were made from wood. He thought they would burn too. But as he considered calling out to Angelo, he found the vampire walking toward him. He frowned when Angelo stepped right past him.

“Hey, Angelo,” Shiv called out. “Where are you going?”

Angelo stopped. He looked at Shiv. “Back.”

“Back?” Shiv repeated.

“Back to the First Blood.” Angelo’s expression hardened. “I have fled from them long enough. They want my head. They want my life. They want my core. I’ll show it to them. I’ll…”

“No,” Shiv interrupted him, following after him.

“I’m not. I’m not. This is not a moment. This is… This is… I thought… I thought…” Angelo was on the verge of unraveling again.

Shiv reached over and gripped him gently by the shoulder. “Look, if you want to go get yourself killed, I will let you,” Shiv said carefully. “However, maybe consider coming with me, going to get some help first. And then, if you still want to die in, I don’t know, a week…” Shiv considered that statement. “Well, you know, in a week you might be dead. Hell, in a week we all might be dead. As you said, I’m System-favored, and I’m really, really favored. So, those are your options from my perspective. I’d frankly want you to pick the one where you live at least a little while longer.”

The beautiful rogue vampire’s expression turned into something Shiv couldn’t read. And then Shiv couldn’t read him altogether because he looked away.

“I really hate how effective your Charm Skill is,” Shiv muttered.

“I’m sorry,” Angelo said. “But… I don’t matter… I shouldn’t live. I can’t… Why do you care what happens to something like me? I see the relish in your eyes. It pleased you to kill my kind.”

Shiv considered that. Why did he care about Angelo? He was just a vampire he came across. Just some screaming victim he decided to save. And that was just it. He felt bad for the poor bastard. And ultimately, he’d never met a non-terrible vampire before. Angelo was novel, and Angelo was tragic. Together, that was enough.

“Well, it seemed like you needed help,” Shiv said. “After everything I did recently, I think I should help more people. I try, but…” He thought about the people who died when he fought at Weave. He thought about the slaves that died when the Jealousy came crashing down. He thought about the mass death experienced across Gate Theborn during his battle against the Recollector. “Everyone… People…” Shiv gathered his words. “People seem to die around me, and I don’t want that. I want to be better, so I’m going to help you if you let me. I’m going to do the right thing. I’m going to kill the bastards, but I’m also going to be careful. I’m going to help more people. More helpless people. The System might want strife, but I want to see a better world.”

Angelo continued gawking at him. The vampire’s expression turned from offended to incredulous to tearful to a point of neutrality. “How? How are you real? Favored… they are not like you…”

“What do you mean, they’re not like me?” Shiv said.

“Favored are creatures of power and brutality. Everything is for their skills. They use others and live not as people, but only as Pathbearers.” Angelo shook his head.

Every single word the vampire spoke came from a point of trauma. Shiv didn’t know Angelo’s experience. But even in his short time with the vampire, he could tell just how deeply scarred the poor bastard was. Every time he spoke, he sounded like he was on the verge of collapsing again. Every single time. It wasn’t just with his village, though that might have been the tipping point. He was broken long before. Long, long before.

Outside Context Problem: A woman smiles down at Angelo. She is not the first to see him tonight, and she will not be the last. She has found use in him with her knives and her ink. His flesh is perfect, and that has offended her since the moment she laid eyes on him. So she rents him, and so she carves at his flesh.

His siress allows it; desires it, even. Angelo has proven to be most unruly in recent days, sparing someone he shouldn’t have.

It is this, it is such behavior that makes her feel so enchanted by him, but also so offended. Why isn’t he like the rest of them? Does he think he is so much better, so perfect, simply because he appears pristine, simply because he took to the blood better than most of his generation? No, no, he will learn. She will make sure he understands.

“Please, please stop, I’ll—I’ll do anything, please d—don’t cut me again,” Angelo whimpers, and his voice is as beautiful as the way he cries.

She starts with his eyes this time.

“Stop—Stop!” Shiv shut his eyes and turned away. The screen within his vision played several scenes from Angelo’s past, and all of it, all of it, was beyond vile.

I can’t help it, Rose said. The apparitions, they come to me, they slam into me. Foreshadowing is tying me to the world. It’s not your skill anymore, but I am. I am bound to you by skill and soul. I don’t want to do this; it just happens. It’s not up to me.

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“Well, it’s not up to me either,” he muttered. Then he noticed Angelo staring at him, his mouth wide open. “I’m not insane,” Shiv said. “When I say I have a ghost, I literally mean I have a ghost inside me.”

The vampire slowly closed his mouth. “It is well. I do not judge.”

“It’s fine if you do. It’s just—I’m not insane.” Angelo seemed like he didn’t believe Shiv. “I’m not insane,” Shiv said for a third time, slightly annoyed. “Thanks a lot, Rose.”

It’s not my fault, she snarled inside of him. I didn’t ask to be trapped inside of you. Child of my murderers…

“Yeah, and I didn’t ask for you to be stuck in me either, so thank my parents.”

I don’t think I will ever do such a thing, Rose growled.

“Me neither,” Shiv shot back. With a sigh, he looked up at the spiraling column of smoke and ash at the center of the village, the remnants of the townsfolk of Hawthark disappearing into the sky. “Townsfolk…” He looked at Angelo. “Wait, were you like the mayor of this place or something?”

“I was the leader. I showed people how to put things together, how to live off the land. How to adapt new ways of thinking and adjust themselves to a life of subsistence. A life of agriculture and peace. It was going to be… peaceful. We weren’t going to do anything to anyone.”

Shiv glanced at the bonfire one last time and sighed.. “Alright, so here’s what’s going to happen. You and I are going to get on board that thing.” He pointed up. The Court Leviathan had not departed. Hadn’t done anything other than wave its limbs slightly. Angelo looked up at the beast, and Shiv saw the reluctance in his expression. “All the vampires and Blood Horrors aboard are dead.”

“Do you know that a Court Leviathan usually carries at least ten thousand high vampires?”

“Yeah, I don’t think I killed ten thousand. Maybe, I don’t know, two, three hundred? Most of them got deployed off to the gate or something before they came back for you, actually. I don’t really know. I only know that I definitely didn’t kill ten thousand, but that I also definitely killed everyone inside.”

Angelo stared on, and then, with a slow nod of acceptance and a tremble in his heart that teased Shiv’s Dread Aura, he gave a whispered reply. “I trust you. But a Court Leviathan usually takes hundreds of vampires to compel effectively. Thousands, in most cases, if the kindred are not strong enough of Biomancy and Psychomancy.”

Shiv hummed. “I mean, I’m a Master Biomancer, so…”

“That is not enough. When I say hundreds, I speak of hundreds of Master-Tiers.”

“Are you a Master?” Shiv asked. He didn’t think so. Angelo’s Bomancy was… Well, it was there, but that was all he could say about it. It was probably at Adept-Tier.

“No.” Angelo shook his head. “I have no Mastery of the High Gift.”

“The High Gift?”

“The shaping of life,” Angelo answered. “The weaving of blood.”

“Yeah, sure, fancy way of saying Biomancy. Alright, so we’re not moving it that way. I guess we’re gonna do the other thing.”

“The other thing?”

“Yeah. You get inside or on top, and I pull.”

“You… what?”

Shiv stared at him. “I’m pretty sure I was very, very clear about what I’m gonna do.”

“But how are you going to pull? It’s four kilometers long! It’s the size of a mountain.”

“Yeah.” Shiv grinned. “Just a mountain. Should be a breeze.”

***

Gravitic Wrestler 141 > 142

“Slow down!” Angelo screamed, crying out from the shattered windows of the bridge just atop the leviathan’s head.

“No,” Shiv grunted. His Inertial Overdrive was building. The Court Leviathan let out loud cries as its body jerked behind him, flopping up and down. A cone of air friction folded over him and the massive leviathan. They were going faster than sound right now, and with his Creeping Void active, it just looked like a large black mass was cleaving across the sky.

The leviathan was heavy. It might have been the heaviest thing he’d ever lifted and pulled, but between Inertial Overdrive and Gravitic Wrestler, he managed. It just took a lot of thinking to do. He thought back to his torture at the hands of the Recollector. He thought back to Uva being dismembered. And then he thought back to Adam almost getting his head torn off again.

As it turned out, you could only think about the same horrible instances in your life so many times before you kind of got used to them. It still filled him with an ill feeling, but he wasn’t so mad anymore.

He was running out of anger, and as he was running out of anger, his arms were straining. His back seared with pain and exhaustion. “Alright, come on, Shiv,” he said. “Just another level for Gravity Wrestler, and we’re gonna get it through the gate. Just imagine the stupid look on Adam’s face.” And then he began to chuckle, as he actually did imagine Adam’s face. And Uva’s face.

Shit, this is going to be weird to explain to Uva, he thought. She probably knows what a Court Leviathan is. Better than I do, anyway. I should stay ahead of this thing and make it really obvious. Or maybe not, maybe I should just pour a Creeping Void over it. Actually, maybe I should park it outside at a distance. It’s got a bunch of viruses around it, doesn’t it? Better get that figured first. Then, I’ll figure out how to use its meat—or go off and hunt something else.

As he flew closer and closer to Gate Theborn, he saw that the fires consuming its nearby woods had gone dormant. Massive fields of ash and ruin extended everywhere. Toppled watchtowers and broken spikes of bone lay in the dirt. Blood soaked the soil, bits of bodies still visible in the bioluminescent grass. A massive crater lined the outside where Shiv’s Inertial Overdrive detonation had kissed the earth deep.

Just outside the gate, Shiv noticed something: a small army of Weaveresses and Umbrals making for the gateway. A smile crawled over his face. Weave was moving in. Support had arrived just in time. And there, on the ground, he thought he recognized someone. “Ikki!” he called out as loud as he could while dipping lower.

The young Umbral turned and blinked, squinting at the vast blob of approaching darkness. Some of the Sisters and spiderfolk prepared for battle, but Shiv ceased his Creeping Void and emerged from the darkness with a huge tentacle slung over his shoulder.

“Shiv!” Ikki squeaked. Her joy at seeing him made him grin harder. “What are you doing out here? I thought you were in the gate!”

“I went out hunting.”

“Oh?” She stared at the darkness behind him. “Well, what did you get? Show us! Show us! Is it a cave biter? I bet it’s a cave biter—you totally hate cave biters so much.”

And then, behind him, his miasma broke, unveiling his glorious prize. A series of terrified cries sounded from the Sisters, weavers, and Weaveresses. Ikki’s jaw dropped, her heart tensed for a moment, and then she stared at him as Shiv’s Dread Aura shuddered inside his chest. “Shiv, do you—do you know what you’re pulling there?”

“Yeah,” Shiv said with a massive smirk. “Meat. I got us a renewable source of ethically sourced meat.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep