“Alright, Chef. You’re officially a commis now. You know what that means?”

“That you’re going to start paying me to peel these potatoes?”

“You being a felling smartass with me, boy?”

“No, Chef. I just got used to saying yes, so you stop yelling at me.”

“Oh, now you’re being a smartass. Well, keep peeling those potatoes. Don’t let me see you cut your hand. Otherwise, you’re going to be peeling a thousand more.”

“Yes, Chef.”

“Alright. Listen, as a commis, you’re not just going to be peeling bloody potatoes. You’re going to be portioning meat. You’re going to be learning to prepare the sauces. You’re going to be chopping the vegetables. You’re going to be cleaning up the kitchen. You’re going to be helping all the other chefs at their stations. You’re going to be working the grill. You’re going to be making the soups. You’re going to be making the pastries, and so on. You’re going to be working under me and my senior chefs. So, whatever we need and whatever we can teach, you’re going to be learning. Always.”

“Yes, Chef.”

“I want you to read recipes every day. Now, I understand that some words are hard for you, so I’ve prepared a dictionary for you. If you don’t know any of the words, write a note and leave it inside the recipe book so that I can explain it to you later. What this means is that you’re going to need to come in a little earlier, so you’re not confused about what you’re making for the day. Understood?”

“Yes, Chef.”

“Right. But understand, you are an assistant chef now. That makes you a chef in training. You’re not a janitor. You’re not someone’s serf. You do what me and the other senior chefs tell you to. But not anyone else. They have their own business. Don’t let them offload their work onto you. If you do, I’ll fire you on the spot, and then I’ll kick their asses. Assistant chef is still a chef. You better respect yourself and respect the people you work with. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Chef.”

“Good. Because without people like you, the kitchen does not run. Never forget this, Chef. It doesn’t matter how high someone’s skill gets. It doesn’t matter who they are in life, or how supposedly bloody important and noble they are. Your skills don’t define who you are. What you do, and if you show up, and what you give, does. This world isn’t run by Masters, Heroes, and Legends. No, no, it’s functionally run by Initiates and Adepts. People who keep the wheels turning, who keep the people fed, who keep the houses built, who hold the line, steel in their hands, and blood in their veins while the giants above them do their little dance and steal the credit. The world is commis, Shiv. Never forget that.”

-Georges Archambault and Shiv

124 (I)

Commis [I]

Adam drew in a deep breath as he basked in the light of his mana core. So high up, he let the core’s hum drown out his senses as much as it could. His Awareness was still too strong. He could hear everything, and if he focused, he could see everything thanks to his traveling Heroic-Tier Awareness.

And that Awareness kept returning to his mother.

Their conversation had been one of beautiful agony.

Seeing her was… Well, there were no words for him to describe it. He couldn’t have dreamed of this moment in a thousand lifetimes. For all he could achieve as a Pathbearer, defying death was not one of the skills he imagined ever having. But Shiv had that. And through Shiv, Rose Van Erren had been returned to life.

But she wasn’t whole. Not truly. Memories were missing. Her emotional state was frail, and most interestingly, and somewhat terrifyingly, though she still had her Path, she lacked any skills. She was effectively weak as a Pathless right now, undeveloped, unleveled, a whole new person rather than the powerful Diviner she once was.

But by the end of her conversation with Adam, her Divination skill returned at the first level, as did Foreshadowing. He wasn’t sure why that happened, and neither was Valor, but it likely had something to do with Shiv’s Vitaemancy.

But all that was negligible to Adam.

His mother was alive.

His mother was alive, and she remembered him. She asked to hold him. He wanted to tell her so much, but ultimately, few words truly flowed. In place of dialogue, there came tears, and old memories were exchanged. Memories of her reading Hark! Little Sparrow to him. The book Shiv had used to prove that Rose was inside his soul. And when she mentioned it once more, Adam knew she was real. And that realization made Adam’s insides twist in agony.

But it was a sweet agony, a delightful pain. He would experience this pain for every passing second across the rest of his life, if it meant keeping his mother by his side for good.

They’d moved her away from the infirmary, where the orcs suspected she was. A group of Umbrals was guarding her now, and she resided in a compound for dignitaries in the surface district. Even so, Adam’s anxiety swelled inside him like a straining muscle. The tension there grew and grew like a coiling knot that got tighter every passing second, and the tension never stopped growing.

He didn’t want the orcs to be where his mother was. If what Shiv had said was true, if these gray-skinned monsters were truly so smart, so perceptive, and so cruel, Adam didn’t even want his mother in the same world as an orc. Precautions had to be taken. A great many precautions.

And though he wanted to talk with Null Mont about the orc problem, the Weaveresses had retreated to “consult with her fellow Exalted Mothers about problems.” Apparently, consulting meant fleeing to her private quarters in the obsidian tower and drinking copious amounts of strange, bottled fluids.

“Another problem to deal with,” Adam muttered to himself. “Wrangling a drunk, idiotic spider-wasp-woman. Ascendants, what has my life become?”

He watched as another section of the ruins flattened out. The rubble had been drawn out of the ground and shaped into a massive sphere. It was then flattened and placed beside several other spheres of condensed detritus. The Geomancers and Can Hu were going to start sorting out the materials within these spheres to see what could be extracted for use and what would be cast away.

Adam could still see and smell bits of flesh and crushed bone lodged within the spheres. A great many people had died during their struggle against the Reollector, and there was still so much of ruin to clear. But they needed space. They needed space because Adam was going to order the emergency construction of an orc quarantine zone. If they were going to get an orc army, that was going to be essential—the monsters were going to be restricted to their own area in the gate.

They couldn’t be allowed to mingle with the other people here. Not the martial Pathbearers, not the Pathless or former slaves, not anyone. The orcs were simply too dangerous, and Adam wasn’t going to risk them going on a killing spree or hurting anyone. Especially his mother. What kind of commander has to defend himself against his own army? Adam thought.

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He drew in another breath as he tried to calm himself. Despite his apprehensions, they were going to need an army, and they didn’t have time. The only other easy choice was the eldritch. There was no way Adam could lead an army that would drive him insane with its presence. He doubted that the Outsiders could even be led in any workable manner to begin with. So. Orcs it was probably going to be.

Blackedge was being held by Roland Arrow and Roland Arrow alone. Other defenders the city might have had at the beginning were nowhere to be seen, and though Adam wished to deny his thoughts, to turn from the most cynical interpretation of the situation, he expected most of the other defenders to be wounded, spent, or just dead. And Roland Arrow couldn’t hold the town alone. Not against that monster Sullain, who now had some of Shiv’s Vitae, and would likely use it as a weapon against Blackedge, if he figured out its mysteries before Valor or Shiv.

“There’s just no end to the work,” Adam moaned. He rubbed at his face and felt his mental fatigue building. “No rest. I need to talk with Uva about this anxiety. It’s killing…”

Just as he mentioned Uva’s name, he caught sight of a shape slithering out from the Abyssal Gateway. A translucent string burst free from the Dimensional threshold and twirled through the air. Adam immediately recognized it to be Uva’s Psychomancy, and he accelerated to greet her.

His vector-wings flared. The Gate Lord tore across the horizon. There was no buildup to his top speed. One moment he was still, the next he was moving at maximum velocity without any air friction or propulsion. He met the grasping strand head-on, and immediately, Uva’s thoughts flowed over into his.

“Adam, prepare yourself for coming in fast.”

“Understood,” Adam replied. He fully opened the gateway, and it trembled with greater frequency. “How did it go? Any pursuers or problems?”

“Better than expected. Clean escape. But we have a lot of ingredients with us, so be ready for that. And don’t shoot the basilisks.” Tʜe sourcᴇ of thɪs content ɪs No(ᴠ)ᴇlFire.nᴇt

“What?”

Uva didn’t blast him with memories then, but she did send several other images. Images of basilisks, of cave-biters being secured beside basilisks that raced across the Umbral Wilderness, of Shiv and the orcs exchanging curses and laughter while riding atop the monsters.

“Uva, what in the hells is even going on? What are you showing me?”

“You’ll see soon enough.” She sounded annoyed, but also reluctantly amused. “Just don’t shoot us.”

What was she— And before Adam could finish his thought, the serpentine head of a massive basilisk burst out through the Abyssal Gateway. A veil of static blackness clung to the huge creature for a moment, but it pushed through, rearing its body back as it let out a shrill screech. Its gem-like scales glistened beneath the azure light of the gate. And upon its back, Adam could see Shiv pumping his fist, while Uva’s strand led back to a dense knot within the basilisk’s mind.

Adam’s jaw dropped as over three hundred meters of giant snake smashed its way across the gate. Umbrals and Weaveresses threw themselves aside. Recently summoned air Dimensionals surged to intercept the massive creature.

“Uva, are you inside the mind of the basilisk?”

“Yes,” Uva said, her voice deadpan. “Shiv especially requested my aid when he started losing the race.”

“The race? What race?”

And just then, another two basilisks burst through the gateway. They were equally large, and they blasted across the same ruins behind Shiv’s basilisk, sending tides of displaced rubble flying everywhere. The second-closest basilisk was being ridden by that orc who wore the midnight robes, and he constantly whispered into the creature’s ear. Adam could hear Whisper muttering random hisses, and none of it was comprehensible to the Gate Lord. But the snake seemed to understand just fine.

Behind Whisper, Mortar smacked his basilisk over the head and terrified it into moving by loudly firing flak into the air. It tried to bite at him, but he dodged back, laughing as he barely avoided death.

A final basilisk came through the gate carrying two orcs on its back. But rather than being mind-controlled by Uva, being whispered to by the Whisper, or bullied by Mortar, the last one simply slithered happily along. It snaked across the ground to the pace of Band pulling his bow, making his violin sing a jaunty tune while Tequila whistled along.

The absurdity of the scene before him managed to do something for Adam—something he didn’t manage to do alone: it emptied his mind as thoughtlessness overtook him.

Some of his mental fatigue faded. He felt a sense of relief come over his being as his mind got a moment of rest. Rest, followed by immediate exasperation and the spiking of stress as he realized all the damage Shiv and the orcs were causing.

“Shiv! We just fixed the ground outside the felling gateway! What are you doing!”

***

Skill Gained: Riding Proficiency 1 (Common)

15 adult cave biters, 21 captured vampires, 8 tons of varied mushrooms, 2 tons of mangoes and loom grapes, one of those hypercaloric, amber-red, bulbous plant-bulbs found in the Umbral Wilderness, 20 tons of river fish, one ton of deep river weed, and the basilisks.

That was the haul. It was frankly a stupendous haul, an incredible haul, but most importantly, it was a haul Shiv couldn’t have obtained on his own. Uva used her Psychomancy to render each of the massive serpents docile. Meanwhile, Umbrals and Weaveress came in to help them with the unloading process—but all the members of the Arachnae Order couldn’t help but gawk at the large serpents now crowding the space below the Court Leviathan.

Yeah. Definitely going to need to start up a giant monster zoo for myself or something. Wish I could fit them in my cape, though. That would have made this easier.

Uva cast a psionic command. The basilisks’ eyes glazed over, and their instincts to resist or harm vanished from within them. Even so, Umbral Geomancers came by to secure them in place, locking them to the ground using alloyed bands and barriers of concrete. They remained parked near Shiv’s special cooking zone, and he let out a grunt as he picked up an entire cave-biter carcass as an offering for Courtney.

As he rose into the air, he stared down at each of the basilisks and grinned. They were magnificent creatures. He let one dose him with its venom again, and the effects of Plaguefueled spiked to even greater heights than before. And now, he had more than one renewable supply of the stuff.

Plaguefueled 63 > 64

The boost in strength made things easier for Shiv as well. The cave-biter went from being something he had to wrestle with a bit to merely a hefty weight he could drag in one arm. The world also moved more slowly, Shiv’s body was hardier, and most of all, he felt good. Very, very good.

I’m going to need to make sure I don’t get addicted to this, he thought. He was actively studying what Uva was doing for him, which part of his mind she was actively suppressing to stop the development of a lingering urge.

He didn’t have her fine control over Psychomancy, nor her deep understanding of Psychology yet, but he was developing both of those skills. In time, he would be able to control his own mind completely. And that would allow him to get as plague-blitzed as he wanted while still remaining functional. Otherwise, he would be little more than a drunken brawler every time he wanted a major boost.

His Plaguefueled had amused the orcs to a considerable degree. Apparently, that was a skill some orcs had as well, but only the incredibly reckless orcs, as Whisper described. After all, getting Plaguefueled meant that the Pathbearer had to get extremely sick several times and had to suffer from a plethora of different viruses and diseases until their body finally fought it off.

Or until they died, Shiv thought to himself.

As Shiv had held the cave-biter up to Courtney, the leviathan simply regarded him for a moment before one of its tentacles descended, wrapping around the carcass. Shiv was glad he didn’t need to manipulate any of its minds for it to respond, but as Courtney held on to the cave-biter, Shiv frowned. The leviathan continued clinging tight to the biter and did nothing else.

And that’s when Shiv realized that Courtney wasn’t very smart.

Courtney was, in fact, so stupid that she required an entire army of vampires to help her use her body and to do her thinking for her. She could do some basic things, but eating or absorbing biomass might be too complicated without someone guiding her.

“That’s all right, Courtney,” Shiv said, patting a tentacle encouragingly. “You’re trying. We’re trying. We’ll both get smarter.” He just let the Court Leviathan hold on to the carcass for now.

He would have to get the Weaveress Biomancer later. See if she could help Courtney digest some biomass. He didn’t want the poor Leviathan to starve to death after all. And with an ample supply of her meat, he could provide regeneration to everyone. He still didn’t know what a cave-biter could provide.

Probably nothing nearly as good as regeneration on its own, though.

“Always remember, Shiv. Shit ingredients, shit food, yeah?” Geroges’s voice echoed through the Deathless’s mind.

“Georges, if you could see some of the produce I have here…” Shiv muttered to himself as he looked down at his massive hall. Most of his other harvested dangled off the sides of the basilisks. “Ah. I’ll show you when I get you out of Blackedge.”

There was enough stuff here to supply the Swan-Eating Toad for a good month or so, at least. And that was another reason why he looked forward to freeing Blackedge—he would get to show Georges just how much he improved. Hang in there, Chef. I’ll build an army and get you out. Even if it has to be an army of orcs.

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