Path of the Deathless

388 Sparring Partner [II]

—(Lone Star Military Handbook388

Sparring Partner [II]

The Red Rider's Hand recited these words like a droning prayer, something beneath meaning, more intrinsic to reality than any kind of philosophy or opinion. The skin of the hand was shrouded by a layer of war-scarred atmosphere, blackened clouds choked with embers and ash, tumbling along its length, swirling and splashing, bathing the limb in a shroud of fire and darkness. But even that couldn't contain the gleaming vitality that grew brighter and brighter. Even that couldn't hide the sheer amount of mana the hand absorbed from the Supplicant’s blow.

Alone, Shiv could have never fueled the Red Rider's Hand. He was a Legend, but even a Legend was an insect in the face of a god. But the Stranger was a god as well, a diminished, decaying god that was plunging from uniqueness into being merely a facet under the System, but a god nonetheless. The violence he wielded was overwhelming; his wrath capable of drowning worlds, and all of that was poured into the Red Rider's Hand, awakening it for the first time.

the Stranger almost stammered. His voice emanated across time and reality. Even drowned in Chronomancy, Shiv could hear him clearly, unperturbed or impeded by the flow of past, present, or future.

Shiv, meanwhile, said nothing, for he too was consumed by near rapturous awe and more than a little horror at the new power he possessed. He knew that the Red Rider's Hand was unbreakable, or at least as close to it as his Last Morsel was. He knew that it drank in conflict and absorbed acts of violence committed upon it like a sponge would water. But there was always the fear, the terror of discovering what would come next, what would unfold when it was imbued with enough offerings to awaken.

He felt the hand come alive for the first time, something that moved to his will and by his decision rather than in correspondence to his relative position. The Red Rider's Hand had been slaving before, but now it was given purpose and power, and all that called to be unleashed.

And so, while the Supplicant and Shiv were both bathed in gold, wrapped in a sea of shifting chronomancy, as they took the battle across present to future, Shiv halted the charge of a god’s Avatar with his severed fist, and its blow was turned back upon the Supplicant in a haymaker that was charged with life and carried the full weight of war.

As the Supplicant sought to unleash apocalyptic destruction upon Shiv, the counterforce proved no less potent. The fist struck the gold-wreathed Supplicant, and as it hit, the world shook. Cracks formed across the face of reality. Ruptures caused mana storms to spill over, causing time itself to be swallowed by tides of tumult. The Stranger's Garden devolved into a maelstrom of hysterics, like reality itself was throwing a tantrum, trying to shrug both Shiv and the Supplicant free. Yet all that paled in comparison to the sheer devastation unleashed by the fist—for the Red Rider's Hand was violence incarnate. It was brutality unchained, the ruinous destination at the end of all things, and the retaliation it returned upon the Supplicant was more than physical, more than magical. It was, in a word, almost absolute: violence distilled down to its finest purity.

The damage the hand inflicted arrived across all spectrums. It struck magically, it struck emotionally, it struck physically, it struck metaphysically, and foundationally. The Supplicant's frontmost finger, so many times greater than the meager fist pressed against it, that tiny sliver of a thing that stopped its charge, was broken, fracturing down the middle. The massive beast screamed, howling like a child who'd just broken the first bone in their life, and as it shattered, a heterogeneous sea of blood spilled out in colors of gold, in Eldritch matter, in tarnished vitality, in enkindled fire.

And Shiv felt his adversary break upon him. And he tasted the thrill of the unraveling wound he inflicted and wanted more. The hand's glow died. The pad of the thick paw that shrouded it vanished like a dissolving glove. Once more, it went dormant, but in that single blow, in that single instant, the middlemost finger of a beast that could dwarf cities was folded down the middle, broken irreparably, as both vitality and bone were left jutting free along its lacerated length.

the Red Rider’s Hand whispered, before going dormant once more.

Devotion expended

The Red Rider’s Hand has run dry of converted mana

Feed it.

Feed it.

Feed it.

The words that greeted Shiv were more than notifications. They were the purest, most platonic truths he'd ever known. They were a hunger he needed to satisfy lest he unmake himself to avoid suffering the pain of deprivation; there was a primal pleasure in dominance. There was a privilege and pedigree when it came to wielding destruction unparalleled.

The Supplicant reeled away from Shiv, its voice wailing in a chorus of misery as it fled across time, displacing golden tides. But it wasn't respite that Shiv wanted. He was a whaler that had struck blubber. He was a man who'd just bled a god. He had broken something deep inside the Supplicant, and he wanted to drive his point in deeper so that the harpoon he wielded would finally greet bone and bring about a most desired death.

A feeling of apotheosis came over Shiv, even if he knew he wasn't himself a god. He had wounded one in a way more complete than ever before. He'd cracked Longinus, but that had been a mercy killing, an act of euthanasia conducted upon something that had been apart from itself for so very long. This was different; this was raw power derived from an enemy, returned to an enemy, breaking an enemy down to their very root. Shiv wished to unleash it again; he yearned to do anything to unleash such power again, for the Red Rider's Hand was glory and beauty and tragedy, and it was his to use, his to direct, and his to worship.

He didn’t need to swear himself to any other faith in Integration.

Shiv was but a dot in the grand expanse of Integration, but with this hand, through this power, even a dot could pierce the fabric of totality. Even a dot could murder the very existence that served as the structure upon which reality was mantle and see it—

the cried. The skill’s despair and strain were so great that it cracked down the middle—nearly shattering outright. Shiv’s flesh was flensed open, gutting him down to the soul in a way that his Garden of Wounds and Broken Things couldn't assimilate. He felt his Unique Skills crack and threaten to break outright. He felt his sanity recoil and his heart crack, and thus a whirlwind of dissociation tore through him for the briefest of moments or the longest of eternities.

Shiv couldn't tell where he began and the hand ended. Though the hand was part of him now, transplanted onto his Unique Skill where the garden flourished from the ruins of all things, there was still an echo, a shadow, a sliver of the one he'd taken it from. And an echo of a High God was a great thing still. War is, war was, war consumed all, and war gave all, and was the most beautiful brutality, the most pleasant cruelty anyone could savor. It was more than a single heart could endure, or at least more than a mundane mortal heart.

The thing about Shiv was that he was built from a creature made to end worlds. He was partially forged of a Tarrasque, and though the addiction clawed through him, there was a part of him that was unassailable. A part of him that refused to bend to war, for it was made to feed on war—not only to fight it, but to see the deed done.

A normal Pathbearer would have been wrenched astray and cast into oblivion by the whirlwind of sensation and excitement. There were no words to describe how good it felt to be dominant, to be the very embodiment of destruction, to hold such power that no other could resist, and to use strife as an unparalleled weapon. But Shiv was beyond words. He had been broken a thousand times. He had been slain a thousand-thousand more, and he'd come back to where he began and rebuilt himself every single time—and this time proved no different.

His eyes snapped back into focus. His broken body, a seed at the core of the Garden, spilling out from him and the hand of the Red Rider now dim and faded but still there, still a conduit of force and bloodshed that left Shiv’s soul near-sundered—but couldn’t finish the job.

“War is,” Shiv snarled, spitting defiance at his own limb, his Harbinger synchronizing with him until—in that moment—they were one and the same. “War is, war will be, but war ends. Death follows. I don't end. Death doesn't keep me. You might touch my hand, but you will never have me. You're my limb, not the other way around.”

If the Red Rider's Hand had a voice, it would direct mocking laughter at him, but Shiv realized he didn't care, not anymore. Using the hand had its price. It left his Harbinger cracked along all sides, plunging in and out of the future and present, causing time to resume the flow of baseline and the near-halted state when his Chronomancy field was churned to its maximum speed.

Using the hand left his mind raw and strained, his heart devoid of all emotion, an injection of anhedonia overtaking him, but he was still here. There was a will beyond the heart and the mind that defied this extension of himself. He would not be tamed by its baser pleasures; he would see it tamed in turn and used properly, as a virtuous weapon for war. It waited for a proper practitioner, for proper war, for a proper enemy to be unleashed upon; otherwise, there would not be war, there would only be death and the end, and the only one who returned from learning that lesson...

the warned. The skill's voice was deep with pain and exhaustion, and it, and only it, was the reason why Shiv hadn't succumbed to utter psychosis. The Pre-Legendary skill had burned away the worst afflictions unleashed by the fist, but now it was rendered brittle, raw, and an unsuitable vessel to ride these turbulent waves of time. All around Shiv were waves of lashing gold, each one falling like whips, bearing the weight of multiple avalanches. They crashed against him, broke more of him, caused him to take injuries in the depth of his soul rather than upon the flesh, adding to the bounty of his .

And in that moment, Shiv learned once more what true self-pride felt like. What it meant to be grateful toward oneself. What it meant to sacrifice for oneself. If he had obtained this hand a month ago, it would have driven him mad and converted him to the Challenger's will, perhaps even irrevocably. It was too much power for his once-starved soul, too much authority for his benighted understanding. It was too much even now.

But at least he knew how feeble he was. At least he felt how small, how overwhelmed. That gave him a reason to struggle. That gave him perspective and a means to fight.

The Harbinger vanished around him, that layer of golden glory portraying his future self dissolving as less than embers, mere fractals of a resplendent mirage, like the fall of a star beyond a rising horizon.

But in the absence of gold, another glow came, the glow of a grey flame scintillating as if a conflagration containing constellations of stars. The Nihilist was more nourished than ever, for though Shiv gouged his own heart in refusing to surrender to the Red Rider's Hand and feed it further, to give himself completely to a frenzied drive, a frenzy of violence and brutality, and devolve from any notions of humanity and civility he clung to. He inflicted his meaning over the Challenger, if only out of spite, if only because he wanted to spite the monster that he was made to be.

That construction of meaning was fuel unto itself. It was napalm greeting a sea of fire, and Shiv burned, and the Stranger's Garden around him burned the same. Through that flame came a single distortion, a massive chain that was so dense and thick that it might as well have been unbreakable, as unbreakable as the Last Morsel and the Red Rider's Hand that brought forth its creation.

Shape of Monstrosity 182 > 189

Harbinger of the Tripartite Ruin 332 > 335

Shiv grasped the chain instinctively, feeling that cord of absolute terror. He deepened that thread as he activated Dread-Tainted, lashing the god with Daughter the Deadly’s suffering, forcing the Stranger to experience another emotion: dread derived from humanity, a humanity that the Outsider god was slowly falling toward. With that taunt, with that promise, the chain grew yet thicker, and Shiv pulled. The Supplicant was still too large, its mass too great, both physical and magical, for him to overcome. Without devoting a significant portion of his Shapeless Tides, he wouldn't be able to even begin wrestling with it at all.

However, Shiv wasn't devoid of mass of his own, and his Garden of Wounds and Broken Things made him the size of a small town, a literal humanoid titan made from destruction. Instead of trying to overpower his greater enemy, he pulled himself the Supplicant that was now fleeing him in a blind, desperate flight.

The existential fabric within the Stranger's Garden tore. Waves of displacing time slammed into Shiv, and he found himself losing track of moments, seconds, and then perhaps even minutes. His perspective quickly became fragmented. He jumped from place to place, from body to body. He experienced the stuttering mutilation inflicted upon his understanding of present to future, and even momentarily thought he was existing in two places at once, a situation which caused his most baseline sanity to tear even more. Yet before true madness could take hold, he found himself drawn back to the bunker, back to Uva, draining away his madness, for he wasn't alone and he was guarded from the precipice of insanity.

And through it all, he never let go of the fear chain—for he remained that hateful whaler of metaphor prior, and he sought to do more than bleed the Supplicant.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

The Stranger's howls were hysterical, and through the chaotic tides that tore Shiv back and forth, he caught a side of the Supplicant surfacing from time itself. It had tried leaping into the future, but the future, the present, and the past were all still disrupted by the ruptures that were spreading. They were all dragged together, turned into a chaotic melange in this most unnatural of dimensions. There was a golden whirlpool building at the center of the Garden's great clearing, and the branches receded further, fleeing toward the horizon and even further beyond to avoid the System's wrathful destabilization. Through it all, Shiv saw the Supplicant as the sailor flung overboard from his ship would catch glimpses of a whale, wounded and poking its head out from the sea that despised them both.

Shiv could hear his mentors calling, could hear Uva trying to wrench him back to get him to stop, but he refused. The hand had rendered him pure, had made him raw of need, and even if he hadn't succumbed fully to its influence, it still left its imprint deep. The scar it left on his mind and heart guided him like a compass toward fated prey.

The wound the Supplicant suffered was one of demoralization more than physical disfigurement. Though it was wounded, it was also rapidly healing. The crack he'd inflicted upon its long finger was almost closed already. Shiv's enkindled flames wrenched at it, a darker, more enshadowed will clung to the Supplicant's presence, weighing it down and lashing it with confusion and emotional discord, but even that barely slowed its pace. Despite the sheer devastation Shiv had inflicted upon the Stranger’s Avatar with his hand, the physical damage was close to entirely faded.

But the spiritual blow he dealt meanwhile was something he couldn't overcome. The Stranger was not a child of sensation. He despised feeling. He despised thinking. He despised becoming an intelligent organism, a single unit rather than a system unto itself: a world or higher dimension. Above all things, however, he despised that notion, that infliction of mortality. Shiv had forced an unwilling enlightenment upon the Supplicant. It could be hurt. It could be wounded. It could be battered so hard that its soul and shell shattered in unison.

Shiv had chased a strange creature into the depths of its strangest den all to teach it pain—and the realization of its own possible, probable demise.

the Stranger howled once more. The very pitch of his words was like blades dragged across Shiv's brain tissue. His mind buckled. His stubbornness endured. And somewhere amidst all that unfathomable chaos, they broke free from the rupture, and Shiv found the Supplicant charging into the thicket of branches, each trunk larger than continents and with so many glaring eyes that every surface around him seemed painted by crescent irises of baleful hatred.

Where the Supplicant gracefully splashed through the thicket, merging in and out of the tree trunks and limbs of Eldritch make, Shiv slammed into this realm like a missile. His ruin-shaped broke and then grew from every bit of physical damage he endured. More than that, beams of mana tore into him, crude magical attacks devoid of shaping or sophistication, unleashed in their most primitive expressions, lances of retroactive Chronomancy that carved away pieces from his body, dealing the first true harm to the garden.

The Garden of Wounds and Broken Things has lost a wound.

The Garden of Wounds and Broken Things has lost a wound.

The Garden of Wounds and Broken Things has lost a wound.

The notification kept repeating over and over, and Shiv suddenly found his size shrinking. The towers that once composed him, lost walls and floors, the lattices of lacerations which chained his fallen edifices together, which served as churning rubble, granting him mass and serving as the spinal column to his magnified form, were stripped away and not returned. Once more, he was reminded of the Garden's weaknesses—without an infusion of his Physicality, he had no Magical Resistance and thus could resist no spells while in this state. And what the Stranger inflicted were not attacks; rather, they were deprivations, retroactive removal. Damages he sustained simply ceased to be, removed from his personal history by the will of an Outsider god, for a scar needed an origin to be a scar at all.

But while the aberrant Chronomancy unleashed upon him sapped his immensity and reduced his garden, every time he slammed into a branch, every time a Fingerling slashed at him, crashed into him, broke something upon him, he grew once more. Thus, an arms race followed between the physical harms he could suffer and the magical reductions he had to survive.

Through it all, however, there were certain injuries that couldn't go away. The divine wounds Longinus bestowed upon him simply refused to fold to another god's notion of time. For if there was one constant between all gods, even the lowest Demigods and the greatest of the High Gods, it was that they existed in a dimension unto themselves beyond common laws of space and time.

What few beams of tarnished gold struck those god-given injuries were simply ablated, dissipating in splitting rays as they splashed and scattered upon nearby branches.

But somewhere in all that carnage, Shiv realized something. He'd lost track of the Supplicant. Now he was simply being dragged along and deep in the mire of his enemy's Garden, as he was whittled down from all sides. Even with the divine wounds he possessed, his Garden would be rendered sallow in little time. And in the depths of his mind, he realized there was another problem.

The Supplicant wasn't a fool. The past few times he tried to make a run in the Stranger's garden, it attacked him, not directly, but striking his past or where he used to be. The Supplicant, now shaken, was not trying to fight him directly, but it wasn't without options. Shiv began pulling himself along that fear chain again, but devoid of his Legendary strength, he found himself grappling and sliding along that chain of terror with every impact that sent him reeling backward.

Shiv tried to use his Atlas of the Flesh Scryer to pin down where the Supplicant was, but the moment he triggered his skill, everything around him came ablaze in a glow of Biomancy. His understanding of the surrounding organic tissue was drowned by incomprehensibility, for Eldritch matter was recursive and nonsensical, a parody of how cells and biology should function. He could not tell apart the branches from the Supplicant, as they were ultimately one and the same when it came to the foundational biomass from which they were formed.

He activated his Song of the Vigilant, and a resonant web spread out around him, mapping his surroundings in vivid detail, but that didn't help either: the problem was his foe was utterly obscured by just how many other objects existed within his vicinity, and highlighting all of that in a brilliant way simply increased his cognitive load.

A knot of absolute frustration condensed inside Shiv. His greatest weakness had reared its head once more, and it was not a problem of direct combat, but rather a lack of Awareness and an inability to track or pin his foe down. This was not primarily a function of lacking power. This ultimately was his lack of options and depth when it came to using his skills. His Atlas was great for hunting and taking peeks at organic foes, but he had no idea how to use it in a place like the Stranger's Garden, and it was utterly hopeless when it came to mechanical or non-biologicals.

Just as the Garden was peeling him layer by layer, reducing him as if he were an onion, Roland's arrows would be falling in the future, striking him from all angles, bearing all manner of different mana, and he would be near helpless to retaliate.

Shiv still had his Grudge-Tethered Feat, and with every spell that struck him from a new foe, he was granted an opening, a connection to deliver a single blow back. And so he did. He sent cutting waves out, cleaving through branches and splitting crescent eyes down the middle with his rippling arcs of cutting presence. But this was a war of attrition he had no desire to fight, for the Stranger was near endless when it came to mana, and Shiv would be worn down to less than a nub in little time at all.

Even so, he bought himself some time by directing his cutting aura against the oncoming Chronomancy. He sliced into the golden waves and chipped away at the magics that threatened to swallow him. Shiv's Severed Shadow cleaved through matter like it wasn't there and hewed deep into magic, even when it was a far higher Tier of density.

Paired with his Nihilistic flames, he formed a protective cocoon that dramatically weakened the constant flood of Chronomancy unleashed by the Stranger.

Shiv thought as he split waves of time magic like they were strings instead. And then his mind returned to what he saw within that Chronomancy tome. He could store actions across time. He could hide spells and attacks within his own Chronomancy if he anchored them in place.

Deprived of better options, Shiv did the wisest thing he could. With the Red Rider's Hand finally receding from his mind and heart, he dove Backstage and fell out and away from Integration's grip—

But the moment he toppled over, the Garden of Wounds and Broken Things peeled away from his body, receding and seething at him as the many runes and wounds ground together. It made a sound that was almost akin to a hissing noise, and Shiv felt an alien frustration and a deep wellspring of hurt emanate from the Garden itself. The hand that loomed above it glowed bright and red with acrimony, and everything below began to blaze with the faintness of black flame. Shiv read something from the depths of that Garden, from his Garden, and that was the sensation of betrayal.

The Garden would like you to culture it, not waste it.

Overwhelmed by all that had happened, Shiv did a double-take as he found his focus split between his shredded body, his outraged Garden, and the massive vitality signature back behind the screen of vitality portraying all that was happening back in Integration.

“What the felling…” Shiv shook his head to clear the cobwebs in his mind. When he regained a measure of coherence, he realized that an emotional core had formed in the depths of his Garden, and its animosity was palpable. “Wait, you have feelings?”

Hills made from severed limbs, littered organs, collapsed rubble, and shattered glass were pressed against half-fallen walls and slammed against the bases of skeletal towers that once stood testament to human ingenuity. The bashing sound came time and time again, as if someone was guiding a mace against a shield, and Shiv understood the percussive fury that his Unique Skill was trying to convey.

“Shiv? Why are you talking to the wasteland?” The girl nudged him with a foot. “Get back out there: you have the finger-fucker shitting itself.”

“No, wait,” Shiv said. “Garden? Do you have feelings? If you do, I’m sorry.”

The girl looked between Shiv and his garden of rubble. Her expression collapsed into one of absolute confusion. “Why the fuck are you apologizing to it? Wait, why do you think it has feelings?”

An answer came in the form of the Red Rider's Hand, which slowly turned toward Shiv and lifted a single finger at him. Its middle finger was long, bright, and burning with the anger of a disappointed charge, furious that its caretaker had allowed it to be diminished so much.

“I keep getting weird skills with a mind of their own,” Shiv muttered to himself in disbelief. “At least this one doesn't speak to me. Alright, Garden, I'm sorry. Really. Didn't mean to let the Stranger rip that much of you away. Didn't like that either. Listen, I'll make it up to you. I won't keep using you against its chronomancy. I'll let you eat some normal attacks later and suffer some actual injuries and double what you lost. How's that for an apology?”

The Red Rider's middle finger slammed back down with a resounding boom, and it fell lower, patting the rubble beneath as if trying to think. After a moment of grinding over gravel and glass, it rose again and extended a new finger: a thumb pointed straight up.

The girl frowned. “Hey Shiv, your skills are really fucking weird, you know?”

“I’ve noticed,” Shiv deadpanned. He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Okay, so I can't use the Garden against overwhelming magical attacks, especially magical attacks that just rip away things from me instead of leaving actual injuries.”

“Well, why the hells not?” the girl challenged. She placed both hands on her hips and glared at the Garden, narrowing her eyes in defiance. “What’s it going to do? It’s your skill—whoa!”

A piece of rebar tore through the air, accelerating so fast it would have caused a sonic boom if there was any atmosphere at all. Shiv reached out and caught it a centimeter away from her throat.

The girl's eyes bulged, and Shiv scowled at the Garden. “Alright, none of that shit. Be nice to her. It's my fault that you lost so much of yourself. You're going to take it out on someone; take it out on me.”

But the Red Rider's Hand waved at him as if in a mocking, dismissive gesture.

“Is that a no? What do you mean, no?”

It pointed at him with an index finger and tapped a nearby building made mostly of concrete and alloy. Though the building clanged and shuddered and a curtain of dust and glass fell, the structure itself remained standing. Then it pointed at the girl and immediately smashed through the building.

The girl shuddered; Shiv just sneered. “Yeah, I know she's really fragile and small, but if you break her, I'm gonna find a way to unbreak you. Turn you into a clean cube that never moves. Just keep your shit together, and I'll make sure to make things up to you, alright? Godsdamn. Even my own skills are becoming so felling needy…”

“Shiv,” the girl hissed. “Be honest: Are you fucking with me right now?”

“Nah, the Garden did make an attempt on your life—uh, well, I don’t know if you can die. Do you?” Her pupils dilated, and she slowly shook her head with an incredulous expression. “Well. Hopefully it behaves itself.”

“Hopefully?” she snapped. “That’s what you got?”

“Look, the hells do you want me to do against a skill that feeds off destruction? I’ll feed it right, and it should behave itself.”

Once more, the hand gave Shiv a thumbs up—that suddenly blurred into a thumbs down in the direction of the girl.

“Alright. Great.” Shiv nodded.

The girl’s jaw dropped. “No! Not great! It fucking did a thumbs down! Shiv!”

“You’ll be fine. I, meanwhile, have to figure out how to track and continue bullying the Supplic—godsdammit, I could have followed its vitality signature this entire time.” He clutched his own head in exhaustion and self-annoyance. “Keep forgetting what I can do.” While most Fingerlings were devoid of vitality, the Supplicant had cast a spell containing substantial life force, and the glow still clung to its presence, shrouding it in a moving patch of crimson across the Garden. Shiv frowned as he saw where it was: back at his starting position. “Asshole almost flanked me before I went Backstage. Shit. Godsdammit.”

He immediately started moving in the Supplicant’s direction—and smirked as he realized the Stranger seemed more confused and terrified than ever before. “Sorry, Valor, but it looks like my Intimidation is going to get power-leveled before my Stealth does—”

“Why don’t you do both?” the girl suggested.

“Huh?”

“Just keep jumping the Supplicant. Hop in and out of reality and smack the fucker while splashing it with your Creeping Void.”

“Well, one problem with that is I don’t expect to live very long in its vicinity,” Shiv answered. “I didn’t invest a lot of tides in these bodies, and the Chronomancy pouring out around the Supplicant is enough to drown a continent. I’ll probably… Huh, wait, with a few deaths, maybe I can sync up the two skills.” He paused as he asked himself a new question: did he even want to? “You know what? I’m going to ask Valor about this first. But before that—”

Shiv spun the Last Morsel in his hand, and its edges lit up bright red with a glow of Vitae. As its ripping waves of severing force pulsed out from the edges of his pan, he reached across the veil of vitality and hacked deep and hard into the tissues of the Supplicant—chipping the slightest bit of its field of time mana away.

The Supplicant flinched. Its huge fingers curled like the legs of a surprised spider preparing to jump, and it began sending blasts of Chronomancy in all directions through the gap between its steepled hands.

Both Shiv and the girl laughed as they watched the Outsider devastate its surroundings—shearing through its own Garden in a fit of paranoid hysterics.

Shiv sighed. “I’d do that more if it didn’t cost so much vitality for me to hit someone from the Backstage.”

“How much of the life force did you just spend?” the girl asked.

“A tenth.”

“Holy fuck! A tenth of all the shit you stole?”

“Yeah. This is a vulgar, vulgar act.” Shiv snorted. “The System hates it. Alright. Screw with him more in a minute. Let’s see how close we can get to the edge for Intimidation and Stealth. And this death—let’s do a little review.”

“Wait, Shiv,” the girl said. She shot a suspicious look at the Red Rider’s Hand before whispering low: “I think if you’re going to burn this life for levels, there’s one more thing you should try.”

“What?”

“You didn’t just get that hand when you dismembered the Challenger. Your Blessing evolved too.” A feeling of disgust washed through Shiv. He wanted to say no, but the girl intercepted his apprehension. “I know you don’t want to draw on the Challenger’s power, but you should at least know what that Blessing does—even if you never use it. Ignorance is not mercy or sanctuary. You gotta face it.”

And she was right. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t like a lot of things. “Alright. Any other ugly things you want me to do?”

She sneered. “Yeah. Make the fucker work for your death.”

Shiv chuckled. “Already planning on it. Alright. Watch this—and be careful about the Garden.”

Slowly, the Arrow who wasn’t turned, and saw the hand waving at her. “I don’t know which of us is in greater danger right now.”

“Probably you, honestly.”

“You’re really shit at making people feel safe,” Shiv

“I just don’t like lying to people. If the Garden eats you, I’ll tell Adam you died bravely. Someday. When I get to it.”

“Fuck you.” She flipped Shiv off, and the Garden did the same to her from behind.

Shiv grinned and repositioned himself. He needed a bit of distance before entering Integration again—because if he couldn’t use his Harbinger or Garden for now, then he needed to rely on avoidance for any survival. As he got three kilometers away, he activated his Creeping Void and jumped back across.

The moment he arrived with a splash of spreading blackness, the Supplicant halted—and the Stranger remembered his existence. he rasped, voice ragged with horror and fear.

“I’m not the Challenger’s spawn,” Shiv grumbled. “I’m just the guy who took his hand. Now, let’s see what I can take from you.”

With that, Shiv triggered his Scion of Pain Blessing, and a wavelength of incandescent agony ignited Shiv’s active injuries in his flesh and soul—

Scion of Pain - I will come to know your highest potential, Deathless. And when the time comes, I will bleed you as you have bled me—or find a blissful end in the process. I grant you this boon as I have bequeathed you my former arm—Become the heart of agony; become the nexus of destruction. Live up to your inevitable promise.

—causing both him and the Supplicant’s middlemost finger to promptly explode into puffs of vitality and viscera.

Felt like every injury, every wound, every suffering, every bit of devastation—emotional, magical, physical, and spiritual—Shiv had suffered over the course of the last week or perhaps even longer, was drawn back to the present and unleashed on him and everything in his vicinity once more. He suffered all that, and he was unmade in an instant, and the Supplicant endured the same thing and saw its own devastation magnified. So the Deathless was unraveled, but he unraveled across every body that suffered harm, and even his Severed Shadow was not spared, with its vitality shattering, with its skills bursting entirely. He crumbled, falling to his knees within the bunker as everyone around him flinched back and reached out, trying to get him back on his feet to prevent him from disintegrating entirely.

“Shiv!” Uva cried out in sudden alarm.

“Whoa!” Jessica flinched, batting away chunks of crystallized Vitae before hooking her arms under Shiv’s torso. “What the hells just happened? What was that? How did you unleash that divine… oh, oh no. Oh, fuck me.”

“Fuck me indeed.” Hymn winced. “This was… unexpected. Deathless. What in all the hells did you do?”

“Tried a Blessing,” Shiv choked, gawking at what he saw, feeling both dread and elation come over him. “Tried an evolved Blessing.”

“The one you got from the Challenger?” Valor asked, his tone severe.

“Yeah. Might have been… better to ask one of you first about that before just using it. But I figured… You know, what’s the worst that could happ—” His voice broke into a low groan of pain as he felt his Toughness skill burst, and then start to blossom.

Meanwhile, his flesh flashed gold, red, and then finally, a bright hue of platinum that drowned the room in blinding light.

This Severed Shadow of Blood and Bladed Soul 291 > 306

Inertial Overdrive 364 > 369

The Creeping Void 185 > 189

Shape of Monstrosity 189 > 194

Leviathan of the Shapeless Tides 553 > 558

Nihilism Be My Hearth, My Banquet 105 > 111

Pillar of Orichalcum 496 > 511 (Skill Evolution Reached)

“Fuck me…” Shiv laughed in utter disbelief. “I survived the hand, but got broken by the Blessing. Always some godsdamned bullshittt….”

And then, he was falling into himself, and everyone around him lurched far, far away.

[Initializing Delve…]