32 (III)

Ambush

Shiv’s drifting thoughts came to an end as he smashed through a final layer of vegetation. He blasted through dense branches the size of bridges back on Blackedge and accelerated his fall with a push of his Biomancy before impacting the ground. Rather than sinking into the soil and sending shrapnel born of earth and debris everywhere, he absorbed the force of his landing using hisMomentum Core and found himself an eighth full already.

Just then, over a dozen organisms entered his Biomancy field. Shiv turned, stomping through the woods with a bone dagger in his left hand before taking his bone drill with his right. He laid the drill on his shoulder as he spotted his newest enemies. Some slavers were making a run for it—dragging an entire row of enchained automata and Umbrals behind them. Shiv counted eight slavers. Only two had magical resistance, while one had a dot of Biomancy around them.

Poor bastards, Shiv said. Then, he saw the states of the slaves, and whatever discomfort he felt vanished.

The chained automata and Umbrals were dragged along their sides, their weight paltry to the Physicality of their captors. Most of them were either Pathless still, barely Initiate, or non-martial Pathbearers. They couldn’t keep up with the slavers, so they were just being dragged. He could feel most of them missing entire stretches of skin—and see automata with wires exposed and coolant leaking.

It was about this point that the slavers spotted him emerging from the dark of the woods and all ground to a halt.

“What is that?” a spear-wielding slaver, an Umbral woman, curiously, cried out, pointing her weapon at Shiv. “What the felling shit is that?”

A bulky Abyssal human clenched his jaw and chambered his shoulder-mounted ballista. “It’s dead! That’s what it is!”

He fired. A huge spike of raw iron shot out. Back when Shiv was Pathless, he wouldn’t be able to perceive this thing coming. Now, it was practically a snail to him. Shiv tapped his bone drill against the coming projectile and stole its momentum. It crashed into the mud at his feet. Shiv stepped over it.

The Abyssal human’s eyes widened as he tried to ready another shot. Shiv tested the man’s Reflexes with his bone drill in response. A second later, the man was pinned chest-first to the base of a mushroom, gurgling blood as the other slavers looked on in horror.

“Looks like you need to work on your Reflexes,” Shiv said, feeling the man writhe. “Well. Maybe in another life. I think… yeah, I hit them. The drill’s through your ascending aorta. Won’t be long now.”

The Abyssal human’s leg twitched as he relieved himself a final time.

The other slavers moaned in horror, and now the slaves were looking up at Shiv from where they lay. He stood there silently, draped in his own flayed skin, wearing his own bones, a pitch-black dimensional cloak shivering behind him, casting him with another layer of menace.

“Shiv. Do you know the best way to win a bout?” Adam had asked before Shiv launched himself.

“Kill them before they’re ready?” Shiv had replied.

“No. It’s to win without even fighting. And that might be something you can do with your… habits. You certainly enjoyed terrifying me earlier, so why not use it against those actually deserving?”

“Is that why I’m wearing my own skin?”

“Yes. Horrific as it is. It might make them surrender. If nothing else, I expect you to get a Master-Tier Evolution for Intimidation soon.”

And Adam might not be wrong. Both the slavers and the slaves shared a mutual expression of absolute terror. There was an Umbral child among the slaves, her lip quivering, her small body shaking. The armed slavers weren’t much better. One of them tried to run. Shiv shaped his Biomancy and held her skin in place. While her muscles kept going. She pushed forward. Shiv pulled back. A second and a bone-chilling ripping sound later, most of the slavers and slaves got an in-depth anatomy lesson from Shiv as they looked upon the fleeing slaver’s exposed flesh.

Practical Metabiology > 13

“Hell yeah!” Shiv laughed. “I finally pulled that off.” He was proud of himself. He had been trying to extract the skin off someone without doing any deeper damage to improve his control. Ekkihurst claimed it was supposed to be simple in Odes, so Shiv kept trying—and was rewarded. It didn’t strain his Biomancy much at all, either. It was just about disconnecting the right parts and supporting the rest.

A whimper of absolute horror sounded from the Umbral slaver holding the spear. She turned. Shiv stared intently at her… and thought it best that he find a male to test Perfect Semblance on. It might be awkward pretending to be a woman. And an Umbral woman at that. He looked at the other slavers.

“Alright. Which one of you is the prettiest? I need a new face.”

The Umbral slaver’s eyes rolled up into the back of her head, and she dropped. The other ones screamed. The slaves screamed harder. Including the small slave child—her heart was pumping at dangerous speeds.

Intimidation > 18

Ah shit, Shiv winced. I didn’t want to traumatize the slaves too. Dammit.

Stolen story; please report.

“Shiv! Shiv!”

A series of arrows crashed against something hard as Adam called in. “I found a tougher nut—and the bastard elemental’s closing in on Ikki. Follow the sound of my arrows and deal with the problem!”

“Got it,” Shiv said. He looked at the slavers. “Never mind. I’ll take one from one of your corpses later.”

This was the exact wrong thing to say if he wanted to calm the slaves, as they all started wailing for mercy. It didn’t help that he used Biomancy to obliterate all the slavers right after—and launched his bone drill through the two that had resistance. Shiv felt his Intimidation shoot up another level as he stared awkwardly at the screaming, weeping slaves now covered in slaver bits. “I… Uh, just stay here. Someone who doesn’t like wearing parts of their own corpse will come and help you in a bit.”

Shiv gave them a nod, realized none of them were going to be in shape to run away because of their injuries and how much their legs were shaking, and sprinted away.

“Broken Moon, I feel like a bastard,” Shiv muttered, trying to unhear the Umbral child. “I might have gotten a little too carried away there. Too used to just pulling people and stuff apart…”

Intimidation > 19

***

Shiv blasted out into a clearing a minute later, using the resounding impacts of Adam’s arrows as his guide. He arrived to a scene of carnage. Dozens of slaves lay on the ground in pieces, an Umbral Sister was clutching a deep wound lining her side while hiding behind a badly mauled tree, and Ikki was limping away while carrying a near-broken automaton in her arms. Behind her came a familiar sight—the metallic dimensional made of blades.

The one that killed a slave earlier.

“Run, little Umbral Sister,” the blade dimensional sang, its voice the sound of clashing steel. “Run, and show me your back—”

It launched out a series of metal shards. Ikki turned, bringing up her spear to deflect one—but she wasn’t nearly fast enough to block the others. In the end, it didn’t matter, as the shards crashed against Shiv. The bladed dimensional shook with surprise before it pushed its shards harder against Skiv’s armor. He drained the momentum, but to his surprise, the blades actually managed to take chunks out of his exoskeleton before he stopped them.

“Finally,” Shiv said. “Something worth fighting. I hope you can manage to kill me, because your friends are all disappointments.”

“Shiv!” Ikki cheered. Her smile faltered as the flayed face he pasted against himself flapped over, staring at her with its empty sockets.

“Get the slaves and your sister out of here, Ikki,” Shiv said. “I’m going to see if this one’s worth my time.”

The blade dimensional retracted its shards and started circling Shiv. “What… are you?”

“Just a guy looking for a face. And you don’t seem to have one.” Shiv stared harder at the dimensional. No notification appeared. Well, that answers my question. Has to be a race that looks at least something like me.

“Why are you clad in flesh and remains? Be you an Acolyte of Lord Scorn?”

“No,” Shiv said. He didn’t even know who that was. And that was all the conversation he had with the dimensional. Ikki fled with the slaves while Shiv charged the enemy. He kept his bone dagger in one hand and left the other empty for now. Let’s see if I can get some parrying done. If I can get that to Adept too, it just might complement my Diamond Shell. Speaking of that, I really hope this bastard can kill me. My Toughness has felling stalled since fewer things have been able to kill me physically. Let’s see if this one is… Hey, the blades look a little like my kitchen knife…

Suddenly, Shiv had a new desire. “After this is over, I’m looting you. And then I’m gonna find me someone who can make me a full kitchen set out of you.”

“What?” the blade dimensional said, momentarily confused.

Shiv wasn’t confused. Which was why he launched himself toward the dimensional and booted it in the chest. The air shook from the force of his blow. Might of Mass fed Momentum Core as the dimensional was blasted through a tree. To the dimensional’s credit, it managed to stop itself from being launched much further by burying a few shards against the ground after a second. Shiv noticed how there seemed to be a pulling force with the dimensional. Magnetism?

Then, a rain of blades flew at him fast. Shiv grinned when he could barely track them. The damn dimensional was fast. It definitely had a higher Reflexes level than him, but maybe not a Master Tier Skill. Shiv deflected the first shard and the second, and then had to rely on his Momentum Core to drain all the following as they buried themselves against his body. His choice to make his armor thicker was good too. There were still things that could pierce his flesh, but Diamond Shell made every centimeter a struggle to get through.

As Momentum Core filled, Shiv’s Reflexes started matching then exceeding the dimensionals. He didn’t attack, however. He focused on parrying, guiding the shards away with his palm and dagger.

“Why do you not strike? Is it too much? Are you spent after one kick?”

Shiv didn’t reply—he wasn’t here to talk to the thing, he just wanted some skill levels out of this. And after a few more seconds of parrying, he got just that.

Parry > 32

Momentum Core > 65

“Well, that’s something at least,” Shiv muttered to himself. Then something hit him in the shoulder. Might of Mass stopped him from moving, but he felt a blade punch relatively deep—even nicking his skin a bit before he shrugged it aside.

“Is your intention to taunt me? Is that it?” the blade dimensional raged. It was launching more shards from all directions—and though Shiv was getting faster, he could not dodge them all. He also didn’t want to discharge his Momentum Core right here, considering the fleeing slaves and sisters.

“Well, it was worth something while it lasted,” Shiv said. And then he showed the dimensional that it wasn’t the only one that could do the “blade from left field trick.”

Where its blades nicked and got jammed against his armor, his bone drill smashed down from on high and left the entire dimensional pinned against the ground. The blades composing the elemental did some damage to his drill, but that’s why Shiv had harvested his own corpses. A radiant, metallic mana shone out between blades of warped steel, exposing the dimensional’s core. It shifted the upper blades of its body into something resembling a face and let out a rasp that sounded like a sword getting pulled from a scabbard. “M-monster.”

“Kitchen utensils,” Shiv said, his heart pumping in excitement. “I’ll prepare part of you as a gift for Georges when I see him again. Right now, though…” Shiv punched through the bent blades and tore out the dimensional’s heart. He then chucked both core and dimensional corpse into his cloak. Which was getting a bit heavy and starting to drag.

Carrying a good amount of weight on me now…Maybe I should…

A series of arrows hit something in the distance. And kept hitting said something. Adam was ringing the bell. Time for the beast to come running. “Alright. Let’s hope this next thing can kill me.”

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