It helps to understand the battlefield as a living thing when you are campaigning in a field.

Scouts, Assassins, Thieves—these are your diagnosticians. These are your first resorts. They are the ones you deploy to properly understand the conditions of the battlegrounds, the environment, what is hidden, and what is seen. More importantly, these are the ones you use to detect the pathogens, the diseases that you must treat.

What are the diseases? They are structural abnormalities and functional maladies that prevent you from getting your desired outcome. The battlefield is a living thing, and that living thing is shaped to the nature of your victory. Anything that denies that is a disease.

But this is a clever disease; it is an adaptive disease. It is a disease that is much like you, that understands the nature of conflict. It is a disease that comprehends you the way you understand it, and it will send its own pathogens, mirroring your scouts—your diagnosticians—to identify your structures, to assess you, and to bring you down. And so it becomes a dance of mutual deduction.

First, what do you see of them? What do they see of you? What can you keep hidden? What can they keep hidden? Anything that you show them will be used against you at a later date. They will find a way to adapt to it, to infest it, to turn it against you. And it is your duty to be better at that deep task than they are, to be better at understanding them than they understand themselves. It is this way that the truest victory is ensured.

But do be warned: everything you do, every action you perform, every treatment you administer, the disease will start to learn, and the disease will adapt accordingly. You must be more than a direct adversary. You must be more than clever.

You must learn. Always learn. Let your evolution outpace the disease’s mutation.

–Anatomy of a Battlefield, Legendary Surgeon Phillina Washington

114 (I)

Scouting

The tension never left Shiv; neither did the paranoia. The skies belonged to Roland Arrow, but the horizon? That was anyone’s game. As he flung himself again, his gravitic field pulsing wide and splitting the ground beneath him, Shiv strained every one of his senses, keeping an eye out for any incoming attacks.

He was well past the ruins of Old Santabar now. The ground was no longer characterized by curving pits of cracked glass. The Tidewall drew close, but beneath its shadow, there were other mountains, other shapes, and structures. The first buildings of the Lost Angeles ruins appeared behind a series of rolling hills. And just as teleportation anchors, observation posts, and ambush bunkers could be built into mountains, a ruined building could serve much the same purpose without any additional modifications.

As Shiv dashed higher into the air for a heartbeat, he took a peek at the edge of the Lost Angeles sprawl and frowned. There were many, many buildings to worry about. Many points of attack. He had maybe ten kilometers before he crossed over into the periphery of Lost Angeles. That gave him only a couple of seconds to prepare for what was to come.

His Creeping Void was inactive. It hadn’t helped him earlier against the dragons and their riders, not truly. They missed a few times as they fired their Necromantic weapons at him, but the blackened patch that spread out from him always hinted at where he was. And what he suspected was some kind of Divination Skill on the end of the riders allowed them to pinpoint him thereafter.

He knew Adam had a Divination skill as well that allowed him to keep track of people, even something like the Recollector. If his enemy had anything like that, Shiv wouldn’t be able to avoid them for long.

Stealth and concealment were potent layers to his survivability, but it wasn’t a surprise that a proper army had ways to penetrate them.

So he flew low and detonated his sheath regularly. He didn’t go as fast as he could because it made turning hard, and right now, he might need more maneuverability than just speed. But he didn’t render his inertial sheath inactive altogether. He needed the Reflexes.

Since he emerged from the surface gateway, he spent practically every passing second under attack. Under attack by Necromantic arrows, under attack by Necromantic spells, under attack by Necrotechs specializing in Necromancy—specializing in the very thing that would make Shiv go off like a bomb.

Then, there was Roland Arrow, who didn’t need Necromancy to resolve Shiv’s existence. Who apparently had infinite arrows hiding just beyond the clouds, waiting to crash down at any moment to glass an entire section of the land.

“What is this bullshit?” Shiv grumbled to himself. Roland Arrow was powerful, more powerful than practically any person Shiv had ever met. Shiv had thought Sir Marikos to be absurdly potent, vaporizing a mountain with a single Pyromancy spell. Roland Arrow could do that without even being present.

The man was in Blackedge—still around fifty kilometers away. Shiv was moving fast, even at the low end of his acceleration, but Roland’s arrows crossed over from the void in a scant second. Shiv had to spike his Overdrive to a fatal point just to track the arrows’ movements.

The only thing I really have to counter him, Shiv thought, is Outside Context Problem. And I can’t use that without draining someone after.

As Shiv continued on, his thoughts briefly drifted as he saw something in the dark. It was a massive, rusted shape sticking out from the Tidewall. The uprooted continental plate rose high like a mountain of mountains, but where it seemed flat and square on the side that faced the Grand Pacific, the part of it pointing toward the land, toward Lost Angeles itself, was jagged with rock and embedded with pieces of metal. Not just pieces of metal, but structures; jutting towers and massive buildings, akin to metallic bones sticking out from dense clumps of stone and soil. There were also vines, patches of vegetation in between, and at the very center, there was a large, dome-shaped thing.

Shiv didn’t recognize what it was for a moment, but as he observed it, he realized the dome-shaped object had a large, cracked glass eye at its center, and limbs sticking out from it, kilometer-long appendages of metal that swayed and dangled. It had a drill attached to one of those limbs, or something that looked like a drill at least. Instinct guided Shiv’s understanding. This thing had been an automaton, or maybe just a large and complicated machine.

But it didn’t resemble any automaton or machine Shiv knew. The bots of today weren’t anything close to that size. They would need to advance their skills to an absurd degree to do something like that. The System wouldn’t accept it otherwise. So that only meant one thing: the machine he was looking at probably predated the System by a long, long time.

“Who the hells were we?” Shiv wondered. His paranoia was still there, but his curiosity was kindled as well. For all the years he spent hunting vampires in the Lost Angeles ruin, scouring the wrecks and husks of old buildings, finding magazines and trinkets for some customs agents, he always had a feeling he was walking in the shadow of ghosts greater than anything he could ever fathom.

Talking with Can Hu only increased the feeling. And now, an urge came over him… An urge to discover who humanity was, how they achieved such creations even without the aid of the System, and what they had been using machines for in such depths, below the foundations of the continents themselves.

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“Who are we?” Shiv asked himself again.

His question was interrupted as he noticed a shimmer on the horizon. Over a series of verdant hills, there was a patch of quivering light. His increased Shadowsense, granted thanks to his improved cape, let him notice the discrepancy. Just then, one of Roland’s arrows quickly started circling above as well. Where once those gleaming needles incinerated Shiv and cast him into death, now they highlighted oncoming threats. Oncoming threats that Shiv adapted to immediately.

He’d expected this. It was either another dragon patrol team or perhaps something even worse. Whatever it was, Shiv didn’t intend to stick around and fight it. Move, evade, scout, lure out more adversaries, and reach Blackedge—those were his goals right now.

That would help Adam the most, or let them understand the composition of their enemies, the layout of the geography, and plan their coming operations to aid Blackedge.

But he didn’t need to do this stupidly. His fight with the dragons had taught him a few things.

First, Divination wasn’t perfect. Even if they could eventually pinpoint his location, jumping in time and space with his Skysplitter and his Strider quickly threw them off, at least for a while. Also, casting out his old corpses worked. Usually, someone was looking for something to shoot at, and if he gave them a reason, they would respond to it.

His old bodies were a perfect supplement for his stealth capabilities and formed the foundations of his new strategy. He was more than a brute. He could be tricky, cunning, deceitful. The Deception skill he’d gained was a message from the System, another part of his overall skill set taking shape.

They’re coming for me, so I might as well give them something to attack. Something that will pull them out of position and show their defensive and offensive capabilities, he thought.

He accelerated suddenly, blasting across the land as he pulled on his gravitic field twenty times. The ground split apart beneath him. The air flickered as the first embers of combustion danced around his body. A contrail of heat and force followed behind him. And just then, he saw a flash, a flash of corrosive green pulsing just over one of the hills. Shiv grinned. “Here we go.”

He stopped time. He charged his gravitic field another thirty times more. His body snapped. His ribs folded inward. Some of his organs were drawn down into his pelvis. The prolapse was painful, but it was also useful. He had chucked out a body from his cape, launching the corpse straight into the ground.

At the same time, he detonated his inertial sheath, discharging all the kinetic energy he had and flinging the body even harder against the parting soil. It was like someone was pressing a massive boulder into sand. A smooth curve carved grooves into the earth, and his corpse was pressed deeper and deeper still.

But then Shiv reverted time. He returned to where he was a few seconds ago, before he accrued all his wounds. He took another route, and as he did, he threw his knife as far as he could, watching it sail into the horizon. The first crack spread across his temporal shell. He let time resume, and a series of blasts followed, cleaving at the horizon and shaking the air where he had been before he stopped time.

Immediately, jet streams of Necromancy struck the ground. They cleaved through the space he was just in as screams of corrosive energy filled the air. Screens of festering decay expanded, and from them, a swelling tide of green, boiling mana swallowed patches of the world.

It was all absolutely wasted.

The Necrotechs missed him by a good 400 meters as he accelerated in a new direction for a few seconds—then teleported to his knife. A few seconds later, the second patch he was at vanished in a storm of Necromancy mana as well.

“Keep moving,” Shiv muttered to himself. “Always keep moving.”

He stayed as low as he could, but even at his controlled speeds, the ground was being ripped apart. Grass was practically being flayed out from the soil—and then grass was replaced by debris and dust as Shiv entered Lost Angeles.

Shiv counted the seconds, but then he triggered his Outside Context Problem as well. Another spike of cold entered him. He wouldn’t be able to do this again until he drained some vitality. That was fine. He exploited this moment to go a bit faster and to throw his knife once more, arcing it over the horizon. He watched it spear through the air and sail past a series of half-collapsed structures, their bones sticking out from the ground like broken incisors.

The Necrotechs might have been hiding among those ruins, but they wouldn’t be expecting Shiv to suddenly appear there. He teleported, and as he did, the world seemed calm, but his Biomancy revealed more truth than the eye could see. There were dozens of life forms around him, ones that weren’t vermin. They were human, or at least human-like, and they were scattered all around, hidden inside the structures. A few were posted against the windows, and some nested deeper inside.

Shiv considered stopping for a moment to drain some of their vitality, but he didn’t.

Instead, as soon as he returned to the world, he resumed his Chronomancy, and he accelerated forward. Same strategy as before. He accelerated sixty times, dashing over and over again until his body was practically coming apart. Then he discharged his kinetic energy.

A bomb went off: a time-frozen bomb set to devastate an entire section of the ruined city. But just then, he reverted time once more, time back to where he had been five seconds ago. His temporal shell cracked again. He let the present return.

Time resumed. Shiv took a new route that arced off at an angle, and he continued along that path, discharging his inertial sheath at the same time that the previous inertial discharge spread across the outer section of Lost Angeles.

The blasts came seconds apart for him, but to the Necrotechs, it must’ve seemed like a series of mana bombs were going off at the same time. If he was lucky, they would even think artillery was falling from the sky.

Deception 1 > 3

A massive sphere of destruction spread out kilometer by kilometer, ripping the outer section of the ruined city apart. Buildings vanished. Streets shattered. But not six hundred meters away, a smaller detonation happened at the same time. Shiv smirked as he felt his Deception level. He threw his knife and teleported again.

He reappeared deeper within the megacity, and behind him, a hailstorm of Necromancy crashed down, splashing down from where his inertial discharges ballooned outward.

Shiv chucked out one of his corpses just to confuse them more.

He narrowed his eyes at the trail left by a hailstorm of attacks and saw it arcing from the distance, right over the horizon. But that wasn’t the only source of the attacks. There were Dimensional rifts that pulsed open in the skies above to unleash a torrent of elemental destruction and other skills.

Dimensionals flooded out from those torrents right after. First came dimensionals of air, near-invisible aside from their vaporous forms and their gleaming, white eyes. Then came dimensionals of flame that soared through the sky like missiles, their bodies spiral-shaped, their arms numerous and infused with magma. But more than dimensionals, there were other creatures supporting their effort—monsters made of so many mouths layered within other mouths that his head spun from looking at them.

Shiv’s mind twisted upon seeing them. Eldritch, he realized. Gods damn it, can’t seem to get away from those Outsider shits.

Shiv ignored them. He continued on, deeper into the city. He ignored walls as he sped forth, smashing through buildings. Debris peeled around him; plaster, plastic, glass, and concrete exploded off his armor. Then came the first splash of something wet: blood. Red painted the metallic white of his bone armor, and he knew he’d just killed a Necrotech—another unfortunate bastard pasted for nothing more than being in Shiv’s way.

But as soon as he killed them, he halted time. He threw his knife again, but not forward—to his left. He teleported to it instantly, changing his strategy. Shiv didn’t know how Divination worked, but randomness clearly threw it off. As he blinked to where his knife was, he spiked himself 70 times, nearly died, discharged his kinetic energy in place, then reverted time two seconds before.

He reappeared in the building, and he dove straight down. As he did, he chucked out another corpse, launching it high into the air. He impacted the earth before his temporal shell cracked. Time resumed.

And the blasts unleashed by his prior inertial discharges surged toward Shiv.

Strider of the Unbending Path 128 > 129

Deception 3 > 6

Tsunamis of heat and force crashed forth. But this was about to be part of Shiv’s strategy too. Let’s see if I can pull this trick off…

He planted himself in place and increased the size of his Skyslitter. It grew a hundred meters, and he slammed its flat side against the oncoming blasts before they could reach him. Shiv’s boots sank into the ground. Concrete cracked around his feet. He snarled as he drove his gravitic field against the blast. But he wasn’t trying to overpower the discharges—he was trying to redirect them. He angled his blade off by the side. His block turned to a parry. Frictionless Vector activated, and he diverted the blast toward where the bulk of the dimensionals were descending from the sky. An avalanche of shattering devastation cleaved through a series of half-collapsed skyscrapers, and Shiv spiked himself beside the crawling tide of ruin, using it as cover.

Frictionless Vector 61 > 62

He had been considering such a combo before, but he didn’t know if it was possible. Now he did. Definitely going to do that again.

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