Teams and armies have a breaking point, just like individual Pathbearers. That breaking point is variable. It depends on a hell of a lot of things, such as how long a group has known each other, how dire the situation is, if any of them are already dead, and whatnot.

See, a good team of Pathbearers can keep itself standing and fighting even as things look hopeless.

Some group compositions can even claim to be unbreakable, but that’s not a guarantee all the time, and that’s not even a guarantee for that specific group when the right pressures are applied. See, with the right kind of damage inflicted, everyone collapses. Everyone. No one is immune to harm. No one is beyond the touch of trauma.

And there’s even a specific term for this thing.

Usually, armies collapse before their greatest Masters and Heroes do. This is called the “Adept Collapse Point,” mainly because generally, most of an organized fighting force is made up of Adepts. When they go down, when the core of your army gives, the rest will fall after. It doesn’t matter if the Master wants to keep fighting; he’s just one guy. He can do quite a bit of damage, but eventually, with the right approach, he’ll be brought down.

It doesn’t even matter if a Hero wants to keep warring. A Hero is a dangerous threat—one that can deal a lot of damage and kill thousands of people. But if you got a good group of Masters with varied skills, you can kill a Hero like a pack of wolves can kill a bear.

Understand that you have to take care of your people. After a certain limit, they’re not going to be combat-capable. And after a certain amount of trauma, if they start thinking about just dropping their weapons and going home, pull them out of there. They are more of a liability than an asset by that point. People, like equipment, need maintenance. Everyone’s maintenance level is different. But it’s there.

Ignore this truth at your peril. You might still want to keep brawling, if your guys are done, take them home, if you can.

War is not something you half-ass.

-Memoirs of a Master-Tier War Mage

112 (I)

Surface [IV]

Shiv accelerated down the dragon’s throat with his new hostage in tow before the beast could close its jaws. The glistening inner flesh of the dragon proved to be a surprising lubricant. But as he went further, the space grew cramped, things got dark, and Shiv ripped through the dragon’s esophagus.

Just then, a trembling sensation pulsed out from the dragon. It flared with golden mana, and Shiv felt its Chronomancy start to shift.

It’s jumping back in time,

he realized. Fine. Two can play at that. Shiv spiked himself at an angle. He pushed through squirming organs and ruptured countless blood vessels as he slammed a boot into what he guessed was the dragon’s kidney. The beast let out a skull-shattering bellow of pain. Shiv anchored this moment in time, losing another of his expendable seconds.

The dragon shifted across time thereafter. It vanished around him in a stream of traveling gold, and Shiv found himself hovering in the open air some three hundred meters away from the dragon with the rider still frozen in his grip. It reappeared where it was three seconds ago before he slammed into it. A flash of green slashed at him from the corner of his eyes. The other dragons were firing at him. His temporal shell was a second away from cracking.

Shiv snorted. His shell ignited with surging mana as he cast himself back inside the dragon, back to the point where he was stomping on the dragon’s kidney. The beast howled with renewed pain. Shiv’s temporal shell cracked apart.

Then, he lost a patch of time. Or rather, it was like a patch of time happened to him all at once. The dragon thrashed, the dragon tried to move, the dragon roared in pain—and then its Chronomancy broke apart as well. In the end, Shiv found himself still inside the writhing dragon. Rather than jumping back in time again, the beast had been incapacitated by pain.

And beside Shiv was a struggling, thrashing rider, who was utterly confused and utterly terrified about his current predicament.

Squirming tendons pressed against Shiv, and blood spilled over him. The bitter copper taste of the dragon’s insides seeped into Shiv’s armor and painted him with a foul-smelling stench. The rider wasn’t doing much better. He was absolutely lost, kicking and struggling, slamming elbows and knees against the dragon’s massive organs. Shiv tightened his grip on the rider, and the latter went still.

With a flex from his gravitic field, Shiv tore the rider’s armor asunder, splitting it down the middle and exposing bare flesh. The rider let out a ragged cry and struggled to break free. A gleaming piece of metal appeared in the rider’s hand, but Shiv broke the fool’s arm and took the knife from him.

The rider’s agonized shriek reverberated in the dragon’s depths.

With the rider incapacitated and stripped of Magical Resistance, Shiv shifted his attention back to the stunned dragon. Time to fashion you into a suit of proper meat armor.

A Woundeater manifested upon the Deathless’s right hand, and its insides gleamed with crystallized lacerations. Shiv drove the spell into the dragon, and mana explosions rocked the beast from the inside. It took seven spells to finally shatter the dragon’s Magical Resistance, and as he did, Shiv immediately began reshaping the beast’s body.

It had an adamantine barding serving as chest armor, so opening a gap along its torso wouldn’t work. However, its arms were still bare of metal and guarded only by its natural scales. Shiv exploited that fact as he liquefied the dragon’s left arm all the way up to the shoulder and pushed out all the blood and viscera plugging the gap. He then wiggled his way between the dragon’s ribs and repositioned himself right in front of his new viewing port.

Dragon blood was flooding his armor and stinging his eyes. Both dragon and rider were caught in the throes of pain and suffering, unable to respond. Shiv positioned his head right where the dragon’s left shoulder used to be and peeked outside. The world was spinning around and around as the dragon plunged from the skies. But then it stopped as something caught it. Shiv saw a set of massive golden claws holding onto the dragon by the tail.

And that made him grin.

The enemy was confused again. They were trying to save their friend. And now they were close. Shiv focused his Biomancy and sensed four other dragons enter the vicinity of his mana field. Four riders came with them. That made a good chunk of the entire group. He killed a dragon and its rider earlier. He had this one down now. That left seven. And if he could handle those four, he would only be fighting three.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Should have been ten originally, and nine still alive now. I counted nine Necromantic streams. Gotta do this fast and strategically. Take them by surprise.

“He—he’s got me…” the rider whimpered. “We’re… we’re inside my dragon. He’s…”

“Who are you talking to there, buddy?” Shiv growled.

The poor rider promptly pissed himself. Shiv wondered if that had ever happened before—a rider getting kidnapped by someone else and then pulled inside their own mount.

Probably not, Shiv thought, proud of his achievement in a twisted way. I deserve a reward for this, System. This might just be the most unique act of intimidation I’ve ever performed.

The Challenger is roaring with laughter.

The Challenger is proud of you.

Shiv winced. That was the opposite of a reward. That filled Shiv with shame. Yeah… Maybe all this shit’s making me a bit too sadis—The hells, was that just a pulse of felling Psychomancy mana leaving his mind?

The translucent mana was so faint and sudden that he missed it, but when another ripple spread out from the rider’s mind, Shiv gritted his teeth.

Awareness 13 > 14

That was a pulse of Psychomancy. And the rider was communicating with someone. Shiv’s first thoughts were to knock the rider out or kill them if he had to, but he stopped himself. A thought came to him—one that might just allow him to affect all the other dragons and their riders at once.

Shiv directed his own Psychomancy into the mind of the rider, and he tasted the rider’s pain and terror. More importantly, Shiv felt how the rider was broadcasting wavelengths of Psychomancy across the world. Shiv wasn’t sure what kind of Skill Evolution this was, but it seemed to be focused on range and telecommunications. The rider’s mana was supple and soft—practically like gas compared to Uva’s solid threads, but it traveled far and fast, and as it came crashing back, Shiv received fragments of memory and flashes of insight from other minds.

And the opportunities for havoc just keep coming. Inspiration struck Shiv. He had more than one angle to hit the other riders now. Maybe all at the same time. The rider’s Psychomancy turned against Shiv. The poor bastard was trying to push him out. And he would have been able to do it too if Shiv didn’t snap the rider’s other arm by the elbow just then. Pain consumed the rider thereafter, and while he was busy wailing in pain, Shiv pushed deeper into his mind and prepared to do something unpleasant.

If the rider thought a few broken bones were bad, he was going to hate just how bad things were about to get.

Shiv activated his Icon of the Paindrinker and immediately started tearing himself apart. He bound his mind tighter to the rider’s, and while Shiv grunted in discomfort as his blood mingled with the dragon’s, the rider’s cries reached a fever pitch. Shiv telepathically urged the rider to focus, to push through some of the pain to contact his comrades.

“Only they can save you now,” Shiv told the rider. “Call out to them. Let them know what’s happening. Carry the hurt across for me.”

And trapped in the depths of his own anguish, the rider didn’t realize what Shiv was trying to do. So he cast out to his fellow riders, his Psychomantic broadcast lined not only with a plea for help, but an escalating flood of new and exotic suffering born of Shiv’s mind-linked self-mutilation.

***

“Gold-10! Gold-10! Respond!” Gold-01 watched as Gold-10’s dragon fell. It was tumbling tail over head, turning over and over as it failed to regain its bearings. The dragon was wailing, clawing at its own torso while its head whipped about in pain.

Gold-01 struggled to contain his own horror. He had never seen a dragon react like that. He’d seen them die in battle. Seen them get ripped apart by other dragons in mana storms, or reduced to bloody paste by Master Dynamancers. But to make a dragon make these kinds of torturous noises…

Gold-01 focused. He tried to get his Divination Matrix to zero in on the target. Three seconds ago, the target briefly reappeared as Gold-10’s dragon jumped back in time. But then the target Chrono-Jumped too, and now all Gold-01 had was a pulsing imprint of where the target used to be. In the interim, Gold-07, 08, 02, and 09 all moved in to assist Gold-10.

“Keep it still!”

Gold-02 called out to the others. “Gold-07. Biomancy. Now. It’s missing an arm.”

The other riders commanded their own dragons to hold 10’s dragon in place, to keep it from falling further, so they could figure out what exactly was going on. But as they worked to save the dragon, a telepathic cry crashed over them. The pulse of mana was accompanied by a nightmarish howl—a scream coming from Gold-10.

“Fuck!” Gold-09 flinched. “You guys hearing this?”

“Yeah…” Gold-02 breathed. A building dread flooded the group’s shared Psychomancy field.

But then came something else. As Gold-10’s message fully sank into them, it came with an explosion of agony unlike anything any of them had ever known.

Gold-10’s screams proved contagious. His cries continued as the others in his squadron let out hisses and groans at first, before barking out shouts of pain. Then, a scream erupted from Gold-08. And things all fell apart from there.

Gold-01’s eyes rolled as he felt himself getting torn apart from the inside. At the same time, he learned what it was like for someone to peel the flesh off their back and detach every last one of their muscles from their bones. This pain was on another level. Words failed to capture the immense torture that consumed them. And it just kept building with each passing wave.

And with the squadron’s riders drowning in trauma, their dragons reacted with confusion and agitation. They flared their shells and skipped back in time, trying to avoid threats. They slowed time and searched for the unseen foe that was hurting their masters. The only good thing was how they went unaffected by Gold-10’s Psychomantic broadcast.

Human pain wasn’t the same as dragon pain.

Gold-01 did everything he could to push through the hurt and refocus. If he could reach 10, stop this at the source—

Then, another presence brushed his mind. Gold-01 shuddered. The new mind that pressed against him was human. Or so 01 thought. Yet, there was something off about its nature, off about its shape. Visions flashed through 01’s eyes. Memories cast by the strange mind into 10 before it was filtered over to the rest of the group.

In scenes that resembled feverish dreams, 01 saw himself staring down at Gold-10 in a dark place, a cavern of blood, fragmented bone, and shifting tendons. Light spilled in through a narrow gap, and it showed just how badly injured Gold-10 was. Both of his arms were broken, and he was screaming—screaming as he broadcast telepathic messages to the rest of the group, begging them to come save him. But his mind was also being filled with external sources of pain. By traumatic memories that didn’t belong to him.

And through the mist of pain and near-madness, 01’s perception skipped, and he found himself staring through Gold 10’s gaze. For the first time, 01 laid eyes on his enemy. He saw a pair of bright, white irises amidst pools of shadow and blood glaring back at him.

Then, the adversary spoke for the first time. “Get ready, riders. Because it’s my turn to be the monster. And your turn to be the prey.”

Ice-cold horror flooded Gold-01’s blood. His senses reeled back, and as he found himself inside his own capsule again, his racing mind realized a terrifying truth.

The enemy was hiding inside Gold-10’s dragon. And he had Gold-10 with him.

“Gold—” Gold-01 bit back a scream. “Gold-Primary! Pull back! Everyone pull—”

But it was too late. Far too late. A tremor of mana resonance passed through Gold-01’s dragon as a shroud of gold ignited inside Gold-10’s dragon. Gold-01’s dragon reacted, forming its own temporal shell, but without 01 directing specific commands, it rushed in for the kill, moving on bestial instinct rather than a rider’s intellect. And through the windows of his capsule, 01 could see the other dragons in his squadron reacting the same way.

They were closing in on the enemy—on an enemy that could physically tear a dragon apart.

“No—no!” Gold-01 cried, trying to fight through the building tidal waves of pain. “Stop!” He cast his thoughts at his own dragon. “STOP!” That telepathic message went across. His dragon halted. The other dragons in his squadron didn’t. They just kept closing on where 10 was. Where the Heroic-Tier enemy was.

Then—and for no obvious reason at all—Gold-10’s dragon slammed torso-first into Gold-08.

And that was when the slaughter started

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep