170 (III)

Rubix

Shiv scowled as he took that information in. Why does it feel like every time I peel away, there’s something even worse beneath it? The Deathless shook his head. The Ascendants were full of shit. Every bit of them was full of shit. Running someplace like this was… Shiv paused. He pressed his lips together.

Experimenting on vampires was something he might do, just for the hell of it.

A brief pulse of hypocrisy passed through Shiv as he decided to let that go. But what they were doing with him and what they were doing with some of the other prisoners, now that he might have a problem with. But he put that out of his mind for now as he looked down at the vampire. “Say, how well do you know the layout of this place?”

“I don’t, I don’t,” the vampire wheezed. Shiv smacked his lips in disappointment.

“Fine, do you know someone who knows the layout of this place?”

The vampire went still. “I have spent a long time inside my cell. They give us scant minutes to walk the outer prison, but many of the others, they know what I am. They shun me. They have attacked me before.”

“Yeah, and I can’t really blame them,” Shiv shot back. “So, where did they go?”

“Don’t know. When we were released from our cages, when our bonds were disabled, I fled. I fled under chaos. I fled by hiding in the blood. I was trying to find my own way to escape.” And for the first time, the vampire let out a sobbing gasp. And despite how much he tried to hold back, pleasure spilled from his mind. “So much pleasure, the pleasure of having tasted blood again after so many years. I fed,” the vampire said. And it was a thing of beauty to the bloodsucker. “I fed after so long. I had forgotten the taste. I had forgotten the texture. I had forgotten so much, so much. As I was lost to the hunt, as I was given unto my urges, I saw it, the Rebis! The monster… The abomination that they made here.”

“The Republic made the Rebis?” Shiv asked, though he still had no idea what kind of entity the vampire was even talking about.

“Yes! They fused two prisoners together, an automaton and a human, both of them monstrous beings, monstrous Pathbearers of incredible power. They volunteered in exchange for service and freedom. If the procedure was completed and they remained alive, they were to be given their freedom. Such were the rumors among us. Such were the rumors. I felt such envy, such envy.”

The vampire’s mind now came aflame with rage and jealousy, but that died down to absolute terror. “And then the procedure, it was… I saw them thereafter. The bodies were placed together. They were fused, part man, part machine, fused perfectly down the middle. The symmetry was sublime, but its mind, it was ruined! And now it remains a prisoner among us. It remains a prisoner because the Republic didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t know where to put it.”

Shiv felt goosebumps crawl across his body as he looked forward and back. He didn’t see anything, but somewhere out there was a messed-up magic project created by the most messed-up minds of the Republic for whatever messed-up reason they had to justify this whole mess.

Mess mess mess, Shiv complained to himself. Everywhere I go, there’s some nightmarish bullshit happening.

“Then I pitied him. I pitied them,” the vampire repeated over and over again. “I thought I was a miserable creature, but I heard them scream! We can all hear each other in our cells. It is the one privilege, the one pleasure we get down in those depths, in those coffins. We can hear each other. Sometimes we spoke, but after the Rebis, no one spoke, because at night it sings to itself, and it screams, and it hates.”

And just then, a piercing cry of misery and agony sounded from afar. “It has found a new victim,” the vampire whispered. “It has found them, and it is not far away. We must flee, we must. If you see it, it will try to kill you. It hates anyone that lays eyes on it. It knows it’s hideous now. It knows it’s an abomination. Do not let it see you looking at it. Do not. Do not.”

And Shiv could feel genuine concern coming from the vampire. This creature was practically insane. Even after all the damage Shiv had inflicted upon his body, the vampire was still terrified. Terrified of the Rebis, mortified of it coming back to finish them both off.

“Alright, fine. But just to clarify, you don’t know how to get out of this prison.” The vampire went still. “And you did kill a few of the wardens. And you did try to kill me.” The vampire didn’t respond. Shiv nodded. “I’ll tell you what. I’m gonna make this quick.”

And a final rasping breath escaped from the bloodsucker. “I knew. I knew I was going to die in here. I knew.”

“Yeah,” Shiv said. “And it could have been avoided if you hadn’t attacked me.”

The vampire’s black eyes cleared up then, and Shiv saw bright-red irises regard him. A hint of sanity returned to the vampire for the first time, and he… sighed. “The taste of blood. You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what the addiction is like.”

“I know it’s bad enough that it killed you,” Shiv said. “Close your eyes.”

The vampire shook his head. “No. I wish to be a Pathbearer before my end. I wish to see the face of my killer… Oh, you’re so young… You poor thing…”

And that earned just a measure of respect from Shiv. He offered the vampire a brief nod, and then he placed his hand against their face and closed it. Vectors spilled along the vampire’s body, and ripples of force came crashing inward to a single epicenter. Every single part of the vampire’s flesh, bone, and blood collapsed inward. Shiv’s final mercy was giving the vampire a quick death. One moment, it was an entire body. Next, it was a marble between his fingers. He dropped the bloody orb and retracted his hand.

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With that done, he went for the wand dagger once more. It lay there just a few meters away from where he’d seen it earlier. Must have been knocked aside during the struggle. As he knelt down to pick it up, he felt power course along the spine of the blade. The crystalline matter lit up, and Shiv realized it was a little bit different from focus crystal. For one, its insides were veined, infused with branching streams of mana.

Moreover, he felt the Pyromancy come alive, but at its insides, there was a faint dot of static, a hint of Dimensionality. Shiv briefly eyed the enchantments but winced as another piercing scream distracted him. “Well, not a bad find at all. I needed a new knife anyway. Time to see how durable you are, Orichalcum knife.”

He frowned and stared at the walls nearby. They had been ripped clean of mana. There wasn’t even a flicker of spellstuff left. Shiv just noticed that. Once more, he regarded the crumpled ball of vampire and considered his final words. Wherever this Rebis was, it was probably ripping through the magical architecture as well, and that made them a Legendary-Tier adversary.

Shiv was trying to escape, but so was everyone else in this godsforsaken hellhole. With everything said about this Rebis guy, Shiv found himself curious. There were risks in pursuing them, but maybe they could give him some insight into how to get out. Frankly, he felt bad for the poor bastard. Bastards. From what the vampire said, it’s literally a human and an automaton stitched together down the middle. How the hells did that work?

“If things go bad, I don’t need to fight them,” Shiv said aloud. He planted a temporal anchor where he was and proceeded down the valley. “I’ll just escape.”

He sped forward for around three seconds before he unceremoniously came upon the so-called Rebis.

After so much build-up by the part of the vampire, Shiv was expecting some kind of nightmare of metal and biology. What he got was a winged creature kneeling over a body, driving its thumbs into someone’s eye sockets.

The warden screamed. They writhed, but they no longer had any limbs. Their arms and legs were scattered. Judging by the blood that lined the edge of the Rebis’s wings, Shiv had a guess as to how they were cut. Speaking of the wings themselves, Shiv noticed that the left side was purely biological, skeletal, with sheets of membrane lining between. The right, however, was entirely mechanical, with each wing projecting thrusts of force.

“Stop looking at me! Stop looking at me! Stop looking at me!” the Rebis said over and over again. It clutched the head of the warden tighter and tighter, and with a final jerk of its hands, the warden let out a cry and went silent.

Shiv grimaced at the murder, finding himself a little conflicted. He didn’t really have a problem with killing, but the wardens hadn’t given him cause, and it didn’t take that much effort on his part to keep them alive but disabled. The Rebis seemed to hate them, judging from the few dozen bodies that lay scattered all over this place. Perhaps it had a good reason to. Shiv looked around, waiting for Cripple to show up, but the Ascendant didn’t.

“Felling hells, Bonk,” Shiv muttered. “Just what kind of monsters did you let out of their cage? Really good distractions, though.”

Shiv clenched his new blade tight and considered how to proceed. His Psycho-Cartography told him that he needed to tread carefully, that it wasn’t going to be so useful against someone entirely insane, but they did know something about it. They knew it hated to be looked at, and it hated these wardens for all the experiments that were conducted upon it. So Shiv decided to take a gamble.

He dropped, slamming his foot down upon the skull of an eye-gouged warden. Their head burst like a wrecked melon, and Shiv spat on them. “Piece of shit,” he said. He felt his Acting skill go up, and suddenly, the Rebis turned. It was far faster than he. Legendarily fast. In a moment, its wings were pointed directly at his neck. Shiv didn’t even see it move. The Rebis left no shockwave, no afterimage. It was in one place, and then it was another. And Shiv kept his gaze down, avoiding looking the Rebis in the eye.

Acting 15 > 16

But through his periphery, he still caught sight of the creature. It wasn’t nearly as ugly as the vampire had described, but it was still a pretty gruesome sight. Half of a person was fused with part of an automaton. The automaton side was easier to describe. It was a thing of smooth metal, with only a black bead for an eye. The texture of its chassis was mercury, but that ended at a threshold of raw-red flesh. The human part of the Rebis was extremely emaciated. There was no fat in the man. He was practically bone—and his genitals were missing too.

Shiv sighed. Poor sonnabitch.

“Who-who…” The Rebis sniffled as it looked at Shiv. The man-half of its face shuddered and flinched. It looked down at the warden Shiv had just crushed. “You… are a prisoner?”

“Not anymore,” Shiv replied. “And I see you aren’t either. See you managed to find your way out. I heard you doing your butchery and decided to see if you wanted a second pair of hands.”

The Rebis stared at him for a long moment, and it let out a whimper. “You… are not scared of me. I can taste fear. I can smell and feed from it. You are not scared. You are not like the others… I don’t know you…”

Shiv frowned as he noticed something—the notification marking him as a target of the System didn’t pop up with the Rebis.

But why?

“But I know him. Sort of.” A new voice entered the fray. Shiv didn’t even see the Rebis turn. It was just suddenly facing the other direction. He looked past its head—and moved away from its extended wing to see a familiar face.

The wolf-man Shiv had shared a cell with earlier was ripping pieces of machinery out from an automaton. He was armored now—clad in a dense plate of adamantine with a series of automaton heads lodged along his back like spines. Beside him, drones hovered in the air. Winged drones that had crossbows and other implants sticking out from underneath them.

Some kind of Artificer or Engineer Path, Shiv guessed.

“You know…” The Rebis whispered to the wolf-man.

“He’s the Deathless,” the wolf-man said casually. “He dropped in to say hi earlier, and the System offered me a most peculiar reward for his head.”

Shiv began gathering overflow force. He prepared himself for battle, for the wolf-man to come for him—or the Rebis to take his head off.

The wolf-man regarded Shiv and chuffed. “So. You managed to escape, and your orc friend let all of us free too? Quite impressive. Quite impressive indeed.”

Shiv blinked. “You knew about Bonk?”

“Oh, yes. You have a very peculiar Chronomancy Skill, do you know that? And the orc was rather loud until he started playing dead—and he did that admirably after you were brought down. I was surprised the Ascendant didn’t finish you off. Why is that?”

The Deathless considered his options. “I’ll tell you if you tell me how to get out of here.”

The wolf-man chuckled. “That’s going to be a bit bigger of a project than you might think. However… With your help, I think we might be able to capture a Guard Cube.”

And there it was once again. “Why cube?”

“You don’t know?” the wolf-man said, tilting his head. “Ah. Unfortunate. You are in the Well. The Rubix Well. Here, the most powerful and curious of the Republic’s victims and enemies languish. And we are at its very bottom. Trapped in so many layers, our prisons but shifting modules. Like parts of a rubix cube.”

“Wait, the gears…” Shiv muttered.

“You saw the mechanisms?” The wolf-man said, suddenly interested.

“Yeah,” Shiv confirmed, “I tore my way into this place from the Zenith Cube, I think.”

“Tore,” the wolf-man breathed. “Then, your strength must be…” He trailed off and took a few steps closer to the Rebis. He whispered something Shiv couldn’t catch in the mutilated creature’s ear and looked at the Deathless with a smile. “Well. This changes things. Now I know we can take one of the guard stations. And after that, we just might be able to make good on this mad escape. Be you interested in joining us?”

“Tell me about how we’re getting to one of these guard stations first,” Shiv said. “Then, I’ll give you my answer.”

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