114 (II)

Scouting#

Chaos unfolded.

The weaker dimensionals simply vanished. The flame dimensionals were extinguished. The air dimensionals parted into fading mist. The eldritch beings splattered apart but quickly began to reform. Shiv didn’t want to deal with that nonsense now. The Outsiders were stunned, and that was all he needed.

What was better was how one of his old corpses sailed through the air, tumbling over and over again. In an instant, he watched as a dozen corrosive arrows smashed into it, blowing apart the body. That made his bone armor decay and wither. Then came a true flood of other attacks. He watched the body ignite with gold mana.

Someone was using Chronomancy on the corpse, pinning it in place, as a series of elemental cataclysms poured down upon it as a dimensional rift opened behind. A flood of flame came first, then a massive anvil shaped from water. Electricity flowed through the water, and then fire returned again, turning the water into steam. This was followed by a massive hammer shaped from Dynamancy, from the power of gravity itself. It smashed the broken, mutilated corpse apart, driving it deep into the ground and devastating the world around Shiv for leagues.

As he shot a brief glance upward, Shiv noticed something curious. Three large airships with rings at their cores trailed over the sprawl’s airspace. Within those round circles were shimmering portals of Dimensionality mana.

As the last of the elemental cataclysms faded, Shiv watched as the portals continued to shiver. They were still active. Those must be the dimensional ships Adam talked about. He captured one, but he didn’t say anything about knowing what’s on the other side. I could take a peek myself. No risk for me. I can root myself in the present. Revert time to where I am. Leave my knife here too…

And it suited his current strategy of confusion and deception. Yeah. Why not. Let’s keep them guessing.

Chaos was his ally. His enemies were quick to respond, and while their Divination was potent, it wasn’t perfect. It was confused by randomness. And even with all the Necromancy and firepower they had—enough to probably kill Shiv even with his Adamantine Adaption—they couldn’t kill what they couldn’t hit.

Predictability was a death sentence, and if he gave his enemies time to set up their strategies, he would be facing all manner of spells and skills he had no experience with. That couldn’t happen. Everything he did needed to pivot into an attack.

Intellectual offense is defense, Shiv realized.

Philosophy 4 > 5

He froze time and blasted up into the air toward one of the portal ships. A kilometer in the distance, he saw gold-layered figures. Enemy Chronos…

Most of them were eldritch, but there was a squadron of dragons with them as well. Shiv ignored them and accelerated. He had Chameleon active; he triggered his Minor Illusion and threw out a corpse as well. A mirage version of himself blinked into space some two kilometers away.

The dragons responded immediately, firing lances of Necromantic energy. The beams cleaved through the mirage and consumed his actual corpse. Then, as they figured out the Minor Illusion, they turned all their beams on his corpse.

The poor fools must’ve thought they actually hit him.

Deception 6 > 8

Just before he passed through the dimensional ship, Shiv imprinted a temporal anchor where he was and threw his knife off into the distance. Should be enough as insurance, he thought as he vanished inside the dimensional rift.

A squeezing sensation passed over his body as he felt himself travel through distorted spaces. The transition took another second. Cracks spread around his Chronomantic armor, but Shiv guessed he still had around six seconds.

When he emerged, he found himself inside what looked to be a brightly lit hangar. For a moment, he thought himself inside the dimensional ship, but with how wide everything was and how there were windows on the ceiling that uncannily showed a bright and resplendent courtyard, Shiv realized he was in another place altogether.

Through a massive set of doors, Necrotech soldiers, psionically-leashed primal dragons, lesser vampires, dimensionals, and more were gathered in different formations. The fastest among them noticed something was wrong. But their ability to respond was crippled as Shiv unleashed a flood of Creeping Void and dashed toward the center of the room.

Then, something struck him. A rippling wave of gold smashed against his temporal shell. His armor cracked, nearly breaking off of him entirely.

Wards! Shiv realized. There were Chronomancy wards here, like in the Leviathan.

Another wave shot towards him. Shiv cursed—He spiked his Inertial Overdrive to the limit. As he got to 50 spikes, blood vessels burst in the back of his head, and he triggered his Song of the Vigilant so that he could actually finish the spell before dying of an aneurysm. He discharged his kinetic energy. The room shattered apart. As did almost everything around Shiv. The dragons were blasted back without severe harm—as were some of the stronger Pathbearers.

Being Plaguefueled made a staggering difference.

Adamantine Adaption 163 > 164

He reverted time. His temporal armor shattered. He reappeared right underneath the dimensional ship and caught onto it. He twisted himself above it using his gravity field, and before he could fully gather his bearings, a tide of force slammed into him.

Shiv was launched forward into the ship so hard that he caused its outer shell to fold inward. He tried to respond to the attack—then he realized that it wasn’t an attack. It was simply the blast wave from another of his earlier inertial discharges.

Shiv grunted. Chronomancy made things pretty messy, even for him.

He teleported to his blade and abandoned the ship to its fate. Once more, he found himself crashing through the ruins of Lost Angeles.

A massive spread of corrosive energy crawled across the sky above. It was a larger Necromantic explosion than Shiv had expected. But then it kept going, and then droplets started descending like a waterfall… and Shiv’s stomach went empty in horror as he realized it actually was a massive waterfall; the corrosion took on the qualities of heavy rain.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Shiv snarled to himself. He detonated his sheath again, and he dove inside a building before the first droplets could hit. Outside, needle-thin droplets of Necromantic energy tore holes through the world, stripping chunks of matter and leaving channels of rot lining everything they ate through.

In seconds, the building Shiv hid in began to dissolve. Every droplet of Necromancy left its mark, and soon holes began to appear all around Shiv. He spiked himself ten more times just to get his Reflexes fast enough to avoid the droplets.

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What saved him more, however, was his Hydromancy. He could feel them coming, feel the Hydromantic mana infused in the magic. He didn’t realize Necromancy could be mixed with Hydromancy this way, but still, there was enough Hydromancy left for him to push the smaller droplets aside.

Shiv tried shaping something of a water-displacing shroud around himself, but he didn’t know how; he didn’t have nearly enough practice with Hydromancy. So Shiv went down. He plunged into the ground and tore through the earth.

This was the most surefire way to avoid—he crashed head-first into something hard. Something he couldn’t just muscle through. Shiv cried out as he felt his body jolt still. Around him, the earth solidified. It turned from soil and rock to something far harder, something of a similar hue to his own body: adamantine.

The alchemization happened in an instant. It spread all around Shiv, and immediately it began closing on him, crushing him. He felt something seize his armor as well, pressing at it, but not fully controlling it. A wave of energy made the ground around him tremble. He realized that he was in the grasp of a Geomancer.

Shiv pushed back with his gravity field, but he couldn’t stay here. If they kept him pinned for any longer, they would find him, and they’d kill him with Necromancy or something else. He couldn’t risk the Outside Context Problem—not enough vitality. Even if a Necromantic spell hit him, he had a chance of coming out of that simply with an enduring injury rather than a certain death.

But with how cold he felt, he didn’t like his odds.

Another second passed. The adamantine walls crashed down on him tightly. Shiv cursed as he actually felt the grinding pressure. Shit. To hells with this. He activated his Chronomancy. His temporal shell hadn’t fully regenerated, but it was more than a little intact. Without a good choice, he reverted time to a second ago, to where he was still above ground. He reappeared inside the structure only to find it entirely dissolved.

His mouth dropped open in horror as he found himself trapped under a canopy of falling rain, with a downpour of Necromantic fluid gliding through the air like a shower. He was right in the middle of it. It was this or being held in stasis underground.

There wasn’t any way he was going to be able to avoid that much rain, and he didn’t have that much time either. His armor was breaking apart again already. It hadn’t regenerated, and he strained it once more with his temporal reversion. So he got up to an old trick. He threw his knife out, doing his best to aim its trajectory. He avoided most of the rain, and it sped out, shooting through another building and continuing onward.

Shiv teleported, and just as he reappeared holding his knife, his temporal shell approached its limit. He dismissed it before it could crack, and he continued on. He smashed through another building and chucked another body behind him. No more time for subtlety. No more time for anything.

“Second layer of stealth, let’s go.” He activated his Creeping Void. Blackness spilled out around him, consuming an entire section of Lost Angeles.

He spiked his field up to forty times, and he felt the initial harm of Inertial Overdrive befall his body. His skin tore. His muscles ruptured. His bones fractured.

He traveled kilometers in a few passing seconds, and the surrounding city dissolved into anarchy and disarray. All manner of spells slammed down around him, bombarding the positions he used to be at. His strategy of confusion and rapid, random movements worked. They attacked all the strange positions he once occupied; some were even still striking far beyond the horizon at the point of the Tidewall.

But there were more than just a few observation posts in the city, and soon Shiv felt something, a cloud of Dimensionality swirling around him, condensing around his body. “Shit,” Shiv hissed. “Not good.”

He had been detected by a Jump Mage or Dimensionalist, one that—

Shiv’s thoughts didn’t even manage to finish before he was teleported. Someone forcibly wrenched him across space itself.

Pressure squeezed around Shiv. His eyes widened. A rush of corrosive mana blasted toward him. He reverted time to counter the spatial magic. He reappeared where he was a second ago, at the cost of his shell. His Strider shattered. Time resumed in a jolting instant.

Nearby, a pocket of shadowy distortions collapsed inward like an implosion, and Shiv continued on, but once more the particulates solidified around him. Something whistled over his head, barely missing him. It was blind luck that spared his life that time.

A Necromantic arrow appeared a meter to his right. It was flung off course by his sheer acceleration, but its tip glistened with corrosive energy. If that hit me…

Necromancy left permanent wounds, and Shiv didn’t know how many permanent wounds he could take before he simply entered a cycle of death after death. More importantly, however, he didn’t have much vitality left at all if he died now.

Suddenly, the dimensionality burst apart around Shiv, popping as if in a bubble of darkness. Shiv blinked. He didn’t know what had just happened, but he threw his dagger out again. It punched through a building. He teleported. He threw it again. He teleported. He threw it again. He teleported.

Shiv repeated this over and over, trying to keep his movements random, ejecting bodies from his cape to leave a false trail. As he emerged from the crumbling walls of a building, he saw the true sprawl of Lost Angeles rushing beneath him. Skyscrapers rose. Broken highways greeted him. Blocks and blocks of rusted, cracked, and decaying structures rolled under him as hills once did. But a section of the city rose. It rose like a climbing pyre, a pyre that sailed high into the sky, becoming a pillar of purest white. And then an envelope of flame spread out, a flame so bright it seared Shiv’s very eyes to behold.

He hissed and looked away, and he realized what this was. Roland had sent one of his arrows down to devastate the area. A shockwave of force followed, and this was but one arrow. One arrow exceeded the entire destructive yield of even the strongest of Shiv’s inertial discharges.

“I’m gonna need a lot more levels before I can match that,” Shiv whispered. But then he realized no one was attacking him either. He stopped his Creeping Void, released another body, and descended. He flew low to the ground with Chameleon active and a Minor Illusion projected, and he flung his knife again, teleporting to it.

Shiv did his best not to crash into any buildings. He didn’t want anyone to spot him just yet. But for now, it seemed like he was in the clea—

Something exploded out of the ground below and smashed into his chest. Shiv found himself dragged high up into the sky. He grunted as a massive hand closed over his head. He gripped the hand and twisted. He pulled his field—tried to break the fingers holding him. The hand released him, then something smashed against his helmet, cracking it slightly.

Shiv twisted back and soaked the moment of the impact. At the same time, he threw his blade out and teleported to it.

Marksmanship 11 > 12

As he turned himself in the air, as he used his gravity field to pull against the direction he was flung, he tried to find his adversary.

And then, in the distance, just over a wall of standing mega-buildings and a swath of brutally glassed craters, he finally saw Blackedge hanging in the sky.

Blackedge, veiled by circling spheres of interweaving spells. Blackedge, bombarded by artillery and magic.

Blackedge, surrounded by monstrosities and nightmares.

All around the town fell a constant rain of destructive fire, beams of light, and rolling arrows, christening the ground with purifying flame. And from the Abyss chasm flooded an endless tide of nightmarish horrors, dimensionals, and more.

Shiv saw another shape then, moving in the moonlight. Hovering over Blackedge with the broken moon as a backdrop was a massive, skeletal serpent that wove incomprehensible magical shapes between each of its countless hands.

But then Shiv couldn’t focus on the silhouette anymore, because someoneelse rose just before him, standing on a metallic platform. That someone was grinning at Shiv.

A breath of exasperation escaped the Deathless. His features twisted into a snarl. “Fuck me. I was wondering how you bastards kept finding me so fast.”

The enemy Pathbearer’s massive form was coated in a full set of adamantine-crystal armor. He was over three meters tall, standing with his hands clasped behind his back. A small armory of weapons hovered behind him, shaped from liquid metal, and the platform below his feet was an enormous slab of adamantine. More importantly, it was an enormous slab of adamantine that had a series of spell crystals embedded underneath. A magic-booster.

The spellcaster wasn’t a human. It wasn’t an automaton. It wasn’t an elf or an Umbral, or even a Vulteg. No, it was the race Shiv hated the most.

The massive orc greeted him with a nod. He had his helmet’s visor lifted, showing a face of green-gray skin between the metallic white of his armor. His eyes were of a slightly brighter yellow than 811’s, but that cruel smile and that strange, perceptive gaze were just the same.

“You should have known that this would eventually happen,” the orc said. His voice was higher than 811’s. It was nasally too. “You have been Cursed and Blessed by the Challenger. You cannot evade us, Deathless. Stand and fight. Give me a taste of what I am due.”

Shiv clenched his Skysplitter tighter as he scoffed. “Yeah, well, I got a question for you.”

“And what’s that?” the orc asked.

“You got a Chronomancy skill?”

The orc frowned. “I—”

Shiv paused time.

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