Say you manage to capture a gate, a city—hell, even just a town. Now the question comes, can you keep it? This is a question most people don’t really ask themselves. Most people also don’t really besiege towns, gates, or cities, so they have no experience with the matter. But let me tell you, the story doesn’t end after you take a gate. In fact, the story probably only begins.

Now that the fun part of watching most of your friends die in a brutal assault is over, you get to deal with the misery of rounding up the remaining defenders. Some advise against just killing them all. It’s stupid. Pathbearers are worth money, and the stronger they are, the more their allies or even enemies are willing to pay. If you just execute a Heroic-Tier Pathbearer, that’s kind of a waste.

Sure, it’ll take the enemy off the board, but frankly, if you manage to incapacitate them, that’s gonna feed your army for a year or two. And who knows? Today’s enemies are tomorrow’s allies, and the same thing goes the other way around.

But between the point where you just conduct a massacre and make sure that everything is settled neatly and brutally. That, or you arrange for everyone to be sold back to their original companions, faction, owners, whatever. That means you have to hold them. And you have to hold the gate, town, city, whatever. This is where things get a little miserable. For you see, the people you just sieged, they don’t much like you. They don’t much like your forces breaking in, torturing them, and butchering their loved ones.

And they definitely wouldn’t like you if you or the dipshits you command end up doing “funny” things to them. Funny things that will end with mana bombs going off inside your barracks, mass poisonings, or some of your people ending up getting their throats slit in the night. And so you spiral into reprisal, and we all know how that goes.

Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that. Some of us clearly still need to learn. Repeat after me, kids: “The barbed-wire dildo that is cruelty will end up fucking me in the ass, and the System loves sado-maso shit.”

You think that’s a bit crass? Well, welcome to Integrated existence.

But then there are the special cases. Maybe the enemy is not quite beaten, or maybe you only took the gate by surprise, and it’s still connected somewhere else. The war is not over. It’s never over. Peace is the true challenge. And the thing about peace is, it’s a brittle, unstable thing. It has to be enforced by power.

So. When you take a place, make sure you clench your fist tight.

–The Days of the Siege by Gatebreaker Chun

91 (I)

Deliberate

Inertial Overdrive 105 > 108

Gravitic Wrestler 136 > 140

Adamantine Adaption 151 > 155

The Creeping Void 104 > 108

Strider of the Unbending Path 119 > 122

Revenant 40 > 41

Outside Context Problem 58 > 60

Woundeater 81 > 83

Berserk 9 > 17

Shiv was dead again, dead at his own hands, dead for overabusing his inertial sheath to a level his body just couldn’t sustain, even with his rage-enhanced Berserk mode. But it had been worth it. He watched as the entity smashed into the gateway, disappearing in a pulse of crawling darkness veiled by static distortions.

A moment later, Adam pulsed through as well, and Shiv’s insides hardened. He hoped the new Gate Lord was prepared for this. He hoped that everything he did would be enough. But for now, he needed to drain something, or someone.

He moved through the air, and as he did, his inertial sheath began to thunder with greater intensity. Without a body to direct a gravitic field with, he still wasn’t quite as fast as he was at baseline, but the ease at which he glided through the air was staggering. Shiv winced as he regarded the state of the last surviving district.

One word could describe Gate Theborn: destroyed. At its base, there was a crater that went down for kilometers. The edges were curved in an uneven accumulation of rubble, and several teleportation anchors could be seen, slightly dented but otherwise preserved and intact. The hanging city, held together by extended bridges, platforms, plazas, and more, was no more, except a final section, the surfacer district, which was also mostly rubble now, thanks to Shiv’s violent clash with the entity.

Thousands of vitality signatures glittered below. Thousands were buried in the rubble, scattered across the ground, writhing, moaning in pain. And Shiv felt disgusted. Nausea crawled through him, but he didn’t have a stomach, so he couldn’t quite throw up. It seemed like no matter how hard he tried, no matter what he did, someone paid for any conflict he was involved in. The System was a cruel overlord. Weakness was punished. Weakness was fatal. And should the truly powerful face each other while you were in the vicinity, while you were lesser than they, a price would be reaped.

As he approached, however, the gateway to the surface flared again. A burst of shadowy mana vomited out a single shape, the shape of a man that shot across the bridge connected to the gateway. He slammed through rows of people, sending them flying into the air, but he seemed out of it. Blood erupted out from Adam’s mouth as he tore through an entire mob of mercenaries. They splattered apart against his armor, and Adam finally ended up stopping dead against someone with High Adept Toughness.

Adam was hurt. Shiv accelerated through the air—but just then, the entity somehow emerged once again.

Shiv’s thoughts ground to a halt, and his insides twisted with hatred and anger.

As he aimed himself toward the entity once again, he saw that it was glowing for some reason, vibrating with a faint blue sheen that masked the rest of its body. Shiv didn’t care. He was going to drain it, and he was going to kill it, no matter what it took. He was going to tear it in half with his Biomancy, damn if the mana strain killed him thrice over.

His mind entered a battle trance of rage. His temporal shell flashed around him. Time stopped. Then, he had an echo of his past pinned to the entity. He could use that! And more importantly, he was still alive when the echo was active. A feral thrill came ablaze within Shiv. He grinned. Maybe this was a way to avoid needing to drain people. Maybe he could avoid dying altogether by casting himself into the past?

Shiv projected himself towards the anchor without hesitation.

This proved to be a terrible mistake.

His soul went one way. His vitality went another. As the two substances were bound together, Shiv’s Vitae tore down the middle. He screamed. Rose screamed. His unstable vitality splashed out and dissolved as it bled from his wounded being. Within, two of his skills warred against each other, on one side the Unique Revenant, on the other his Master-Tier Chronomancy. Shiv stopped the act before either skill could shatter, but the damage was done. And it was brutal. The entire thing hurt almost as bad as immolating his body with Necromancy.

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Almost.

As he writhed in the air, struggling to regain his bearings, he watched as the entity flashed with a flare of blue, and then faded. He didn’t know what was happening, and he was in too much pain to focus. Too much pain. Shiv’s mind stopped working. Coldness bled into him as his Vitae poured out…

Soon, they both started fading out of existence.

***

Adam Arrow didn’t quite know where Shiv was. And the brutal internal bleeding he suffered from didn’t make focusing any easier. There were people all around him. There was blood smeared against his armor. He noticed then that he’d probably liquefied a few people just from his sheer speed alone. The damned monster had hit him hard. When the Recollector smashed him back through the gateway, he was going at colossal speeds, speeds fast enough to render him a projectile that broke the sound barrier. His armor was Legendary. The other Pathbearers lined up in front of the gate were most certainly not.

The results were grotesque.

How the… bloody hell did Shiv take any of this damned thing’s hits… Adam gagged.

He tried not to look at the gore-splattered bridge as he took to the air with fiery wings. If he saw the death he caused—No. Not him. The entity did that. It should… But what if he dodged? What if he was faster? He needed to be faster. He needed to be better! He wasn’t enough. Even in the end, there was still a final wound inflicted on his pride.

He wheezed as another mouthful of blood spilled out from him, half of it coming out of his nose. Adam wasn’t just going to need to save Shiv’s life; he was going to have to save his own via Shiv. His armor barely spared him, but inside, inside he felt like he was soup, like bones were dancing through his flesh, cutting him with every movement. He didn’t even want to imagine the state of his organs. I just need to last, Adam thought. Just… just a few moments.

Against all odds, he focused his Divination, using it in tandem with his Seer of Horizons. A violet field exploded out from him, washing over the world, highlighting things he didn’t notice before. Once more, divination was complex, chaotic. He tried to pick out the exact details, and everything he focused on began to hammer his mind with varying perspectives, with lines of text he couldn’t fully decipher. It was like causality itself was trying to tell him something, something he didn’t have the intellect or the understanding to tease out yet.

But Shiv wasn’t that hard to tease out. No, Shiv, ultimately, was an imprint, a weird flickering imprint on the surface of reality that presently didn’t have a body and was rapidly fading as a deluge of substance

poured out from him. “No, no, no, no! Shiv, Shiv, Shiv!” Adam cried out. His wings roared. He blasted through the air toward Shiv.

Wings of the Starhawk > 100 (Skill Evolution Imminent)

It was still too slow. Even as he felt another level pass through his Wings of the Starhawk, even as another Evolution drew close, he was still too slow. But he didn’t think of that now. All he thought about was saving his—what even was Shiv to him anymore? After all this, after all the blood they’d spilled together, after watching the other man die for him time and time again, fight so desperately to keep Adam alive, what were they to each other? And why was the world so intent on torturing both of them?

His mother being trapped in Shiv’s soul, the ritual, their struggle together…

Adam pushed it all out of his mind. Thinking was for later. Right now, Shiv needed him. Uva needed him. Gate Theborn and Blackedge needed him. He came to a halt just before where Shiv’s Revenant was. He reached out, pressing his hand into the near-transparent entity without hesitation, and immediately he felt a rush drain out from him.

It was like experiencing the worst fever of his life, and it kept going. The strange force kept sapping him, inebriating him of all his faculties. His senses lessened, his strength faded, even his reaction slowed.

Vitality. Vitality was the shape of your life, the shape of your existence. Valor said one’s vitality could recover so long as they didn’t die, but it sure as hells didn’t feel good at all.

But then again, it probably didn’t feel good for Shiv to die over and over and over.

“I still don’t know how you’re sane after all that, you big cockroach of a bastard,” Adam muttered.

Seconds passed. Adam nearly blacked out, darkness creeping along the edges of his vision, the vitality being drained from him not helping with his existing wounds. Before he fell back, though, a hand gripped him, a hand that burst out from a dark cocoon and held him in place. That same hand cast a crimson serpent into Adam’s body, and suddenly the young lord felt a detonation of freshness rush back into him. His wounds faded like they’d never been. He was still weak, he was still slowed, but he was—

Shiv looked terrible. He was bleeding still. Even after resurrecting, he was bleeding so much. Blood gushed from a massive wound lining his chest, and he was utterly nude. The fight against the entity had disintegrated all his clothes, but Adam noticed the sheer extent of Shiv’s disfigurement much more than his nudity.

Adam gagged at the sight of his injuries. The soul-burns… And the wound…

Then, to make matters worse, Shiv’s eyes glazed over as his Woundeater burst apart. He shuddered and vomited blood all over Adam’s chest before falling over against the new Gate Lord. Adam grabbed him firmly but gently, taking care not to touch the worst of his wounds. Shiv groaned. He was shivering, clearly bleeding to death.

Adam flapped his wings and swiftly carried Shiv over to the final remaining district of Gate Theborn. The last few platforms and half-toppled buildings extended out in a wide platform from the Surface Gateway. Adam laid Shiv on the ground at the center of a badly ruined plaza. He tore some bedsheets that were scattered on the ground to cover Shiv’s body.

The dense masses of survivors backed off from their new Gate Lord, clearing away from the Deathless that had struggled against the entity for them. Adam looked down at Shiv. The younger man was shaking. The left side of his body was mostly a charred ruin, and now he had a wide and ugly gash lining his chest. As Shiv moved, his wound opened further. Adam could see the gleam of metallic bone, could see the shine of adamantine flesh split wide open. Shiv’s blood stopped welling for a moment, and his body began to glow with Biomancy. “Adam,” he gagged. Blood splurged out from his mouth. “I need… I… Just keeping my own blood pumping… Hard to…”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Adam said. It wasn’t okay. He was hyperventilating. He had no understanding of Biomancy. He had no capability of helping Shiv whatsoever. He knew even less about the limits of Shiv’s resurrective skill. He wasn’t sure if the Deathless would be able to come back to life again in his current state. “Biomancer!” he cried out. “Is anyone here a Biomancer?”

No one approached. No one responded. The remaining mercenaries bunched together on the bridge to the Surface Gateway stared wide-eyed at him. And then, from the group, he saw a face, the face of a goblin. Her expression was ashen, and she held her arm as if it was broken. “Siggy! Siggy!” he cried out. He pointed at her, and she reeled back as if someone just slapped her across the face with a belt. “Just get over here, dammit! Get over here!”

A moment of indecision washed through her features, but then she shot forth, moving on fast feet. “Yeah, Gate Lord! Guys, this is Gate Lord Arrow. He’s the one I’ve been telling you about! He’s the guy—”

“Never mind that shit!” Adam cried. “Look—get me a Biomancer. Get someone to help.”

And then a hard hand grabbed Adam, a hard hand that shuddered with a layer of thundering force. Adam groaned as he felt something smash hard into his body over and over again. Then, the inertial sheath dissipated.

Shiv gritted his teeth. “Sorry, it’s hard to—Inertial Overdrive… Just builds… Can’t focus.” He was slurring his words, and his eyes were rolling. His body was still glowing with a brilliant red. He was channeling so much Biomancy mana it was starting to become visible for Adam as well.

“Okay, it’s okay,” Adam said. He cupped Shiv’s face and made the large brute of a man look him in the eye. “You’re going to be fine. You’re going to be alright.”

“I need to focus,” Shiv growled. He clenched his jaw. “I need to… I’ll keep myself alive, but I won’t be able to help you. I fucked myself up bad, Adam. I tore myself. I tried to jump across time… but I didn’t have a body. The skills didn’t know how to work together—I was just trying to help you and… and…”

“It’s okay. It’s okay. That’s okay,” Adam repeated the word over and over again. It was more for him than Shiv. Shiv wasn’t just bleeding materially—Adam saw how his soul was bleeding earlier. And the only one who knew anything about soul wounds was… Valor. Fuck! “Do… do whatever you need to.”

Adam reached out and grabbed Siggy by the shoulder. He drew her in close, rougher than he’d wanted. The goblin flinched, terrified. “Find him a Biomancer! Find him as many people with Biomancy as possible. Doesn’t matter what Tier. Keep him alive. Do you understand me? And if he dies, let him drain from you. Let him drain from anyone here. Anyone!” Adam shouted. “Anyone! This is my first decree as Gate Lord! Do not let him die! Do not let him die or I will bring the godsdamn mana core down on every bastard mercenary, slaver, and butcher I see! You are responsible for his life!”

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