119 (I)  Offer [I]

I don't know how to stop the orcs. Let's start there. I have no idea.

This war has been going on for generations. Longer than my grandmother can remember. Maybe just as long as the last incursion. We're Lone Star. We fight. Our automata build their inheritors to be bombers, gunners, processors, and makers. They yearn to become walking factories on legs, or siege engines that hold sky and land. Our children are soldiers from the day they're born. We live together in packs. No one even goes to take a shit alone.

Across the world, our Artillerists and our Rangers are known and honored, and yet we are being ground down. I've looked at the demographics. It's not going to be enough for much longer.

We do not have three more generations, and the orcs have limitless numbers. They keep coming. There's always more of them. They don't stay dead.

And every summer, it gets worse. That Legendary Warlord of theirs is learning our ways. He's adopting our ways. More than stealth, they're starting up their own artillery corps. They're fighting just like us. They wear uniforms designed in mockery of ours.

And meanwhile, we die. They take our towns, and we hear the screams on the wind. It isn't just the people in the towns they kill.

I looked at the suicide statistics of first responders. I don't want to ever see that again. They're breaking us in more ways than one.

Knowing all this, I couldn't go on anymore. I needed to understand how to stop them. I needed to learn their ways. So I did the unthinkable. I reached out to their Challenger. I accepted that offer he had for me. The offer that had been there for 20 years. 20 years I ignored it. 20 long years. And finally, I agreed.

He sent me an orc to teach me their ways. To show me how to get better at killing them. And he did show me. And he did fight for me. He killed his own kind. He instructed me on orc psychology. On their nature. On their weaknesses.

And through it all, I learned that there's nothing to break there. They love this. The struggle of war. You can't torture an orc because, while he might not enjoy the pain as it's being inflicted, it's ultimately all in good fun for him. It's a novel experience. He'll remember you, and he'll come back, and he'll try to outdo you. He'll try to torture you better than you tortured him.

And they don't care about each other. They can only love someone that isn't an orc. Maybe that's our only advantage. Humanity will fight together. We're communal. Tribal. They are a group of apex predators that put up with each other because they treat our world as a shared hunting ground.

High Command is delusional. They think that if we can mass enough artillery, enough powerful Pathbearers to perform one final charge, that we can get to the other side of their gate and destroy the connection between their dimension and ours. They don't know what the Tutorial is like. They've never seen it. But I have. The orc showed me much of his memories. That place is a death pit. We’re not taking it. Not as we are.

What we need is someone that is more than the orcs. That's better at brutality than they. That's more committed to violence. That's more willing to learn, adapt, become, and assimilate the ways of war than the orcs. We need someone that is practically exactly like them but isn't ruled by cruelty, isn't consumed by brutality, isn't enslaved to the cruel god that is the Challenger.

But where the fuck are we gonna find someone like that?

-Hero-Ranger Morgan Munny

119 (I)

Offer [I]

Adam's pace suddenly slowed to a crawl, just as he arrived before the doors of the infirmary. Prior to this point, he had been flying fast, curving and twisting through the air with such a eulogy that Shiv couldn't keep up with him—not without throwing his knife and reorienting the direction of his Inertial Overdrive.

But it wasn't hard to figure out why the Gate Lord stopped. Uncertainty gripped Adam. Anxiety. There was a great deal of weight that he felt. Meeting a mother he'd known to be dead all his life, a mother resurrected by someone he once hated.

But though Adam's footsteps slowed, Shiv's didn't. He seized Adam by his shoulders, and he began to push him forward.

"There's no need for this," Adam snarled, shaking Shiv off. "I'm moving. Don't rush me."

"Not rushing you," Shiv said. "But you gotta put one foot in front of the other. This was never gonna be easy, but you need to talk to her. No running away now.”

"Just give me time," Adam spat.

Shiv stopped walking. Adam stumbled away from him. He eyed the Deathless with an annoyed glare. But then the look softened, and the true depths of Adam's fear exposed themselves in his eyes. He resembled a child now more than ever. His gaze lingered on Shiv's as if he were looking for direction. But where Adam was hesitant, Shiv only knew one way through trauma and discomfort.

Forward.

"Listen, Adam," Shiv began. But then, instead of pressing on, he actually spent a moment longer thinking about his words. His Psychology and Philosophy Skills worked in tandem as he processed his own thoughts. What did he want to say to Adam? What was his intention right now? Was it to pressure his brother-in-arms? To get him to meet his mother immediately and see the matter done? Or was he trying to make Adam feel better? To assuage the Gate Lord's feelings and ensure that he didn't suffer any more lingering trauma? And there was bound to be trauma, especially after all that had happened. Especially after all these years lost.

I just want Adam to experience the best outcome. Whatever that is.

Adam stared at him uncertainly. "I'm not delaying," Adam said, making up a justification. "I'm just thinking about what I'm trying to say as well."

They were merely a few meters away from the door. An Umbral emerged from Rose's room, and she spotted both Shiv and Adam. But before she could say anything, Shiv held up a hand, and a strand of Uva's Psychomancy passed through her as well.

Immediately, she offered a nod and continued down the hall the other way. The rest of the rooms along the hall were empty, save for a Weaveress taking a nap with a magazine over her face. Standing in the hall were Adam, Uva, and Shiv.

Valor waited at the entrance, and Can Hu drifted there alongside him. The Penitent and the Legendary Pathbearer were talking. Both of them were looking at Shiv. He was going to have to discuss things with them afterward as well. But for now, Adam had need of him, even if the Gate Lord wasn't sure about it.

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"Listen, Adam, I'm not going to force you to do anything. No one in this gate can force you to do anything," Shiv said. "I don't know what it's like for you. I won't pretend to know. But I can tell you this. You're going to have to walk through that door at some point. If you're too stressed after what we've just been through, fine. But it has to be soon. There's not a lot of time to delay."

"I know," Adam whispered.

"What are you afraid of?" Shiv asked.

"I don't know," Adam said. "My mother is back, I think. Or is she? Is she even my mother? Shiv, you pulled a woman that looks like Rose Van Erren out of your Vitae. She—I want to hope. But I'm also…” The Gate Lord looked down at the ground and bit his lip. “I’m scared. I’m afraid this will be taken from me.”

"Yeah," Shiv said, nodding in agreement. "We don't know. So, if this is going to hurt you, then it's a question of now or later. When do you want to get stabbed?"

And Adam's expression turned sour. It was an ugly statement, almost too ugly, but it was the right statement. Adam turned away, and he let out a sigh. "Yes, yes, now or later, I suppose. Now. I choose now.”

Silver Tongue 22 > 23

Psychology 6 > 7

"I'll be right behind you," Shiv said. "Maybe I should wait outside too. I'll be here if you need me, but I don't think I should be the person in the background when you step in." He paused, trying to think about how to put this.

"I look like my father," Shiv said, "and the last memory your mother probably had before she died was of him cutting her unborn daughter out of her. It was brutal. It was horrible." Adam looked like he was going to be sick, but Shiv had to bring it up. "I don't want to hurt her any more than you do. Not in that way. She needs you. And if you need me, I'll be outside."

And as the disgust faded from the Gate Lord's eyes, he gave Shiv a final look of gratitude, and he turned, and he shuffled toward the room. At least he shuffled at first, but soon his shuffling became proper steps, and then finally he was at the doorway. He stopped. He looked back one last time, and Shiv, true to his word, was there, with Uva beside him.

Finally, Adam gave them a nod, and he stepped in, and Shiv turned all his senses away. Adam deserved privacy. Shiv did his best not to peek, to ignore how Adam was standing past the doorway, just staring at his mother as she lay in bed.

And suddenly, Shiv felt the touch of a soft pair of lips grace the side of his right cheek. He looked to the side, and he saw Uva hovering just below him, pressed up against him upon her board. The basilisk venom was still active in his body. He was standing at three and a half meters in height, and he felt more like a small house than a person at this point.

When he spiked his gravity field earlier, he tore a massive chasm in the earth behind him. The basilisk venom was like a steroid of steroids for his Plaguefueled skill.

Yeah, Shiv thought to himself as he mentally chuckled, basilisk venom is going to be the next thing I'm going to figure out how to create using my Biomancy. It'll work great on my enemies if I want to incapacitate them, but more importantly…

The only downside right now was that it took Uva’s Psychomancy to hold the worst of his drunkenness at bay. That was another thing he needed to improve on if he was going to use the basilisk venom: self-control. This wasn't like drinking five cans of beer. This was like hammering down half a dozen bottles of liquor in a row.

He had only done that once, with Georges, on the eve of his 16th birthday. He'd insinuated that, due to his increase in height and muscle mass, he would drink the head chef under the table. It was meant as a jest. A Pathbearer was always more resistant than a Pathless, be it to poison or physical harm. But Georges had a funny way of treating jokes, especially jokes that annoyed him. And Shiv, meanwhile, had a problem with backing down from challenges.

The consequences were disastrous. But it did get amusing when Shiv perfectly peeled his potatoes the next day anyway, despite suffering from the mother of all hangovers. Some of his hand flesh went in with those potatoes, though, so Georges got to scream at him anyway.

It’s a good day when everyone wins.

"That was very viciously sweet of you," Uva commented.

He grunted as he looked at the door. "Yeah," Shiv said, "I'm just… I don't know. I feel responsible. I don't feel bad, or like I'm wrong, or like I did anything bad, but I feel responsible for what happened to him. What happened to both of them?" He looked down, and he shook his head.

Scenes played in his mind. Horrible scenes of his father bringing a blade down on an infant girl who wasn't ready to be born, and then on his own wife… His own pregnant wife, who had Shiv inside her.

Uva shuddered slightly as she glimpsed the memories. "What kind of demented ritual was that?"

"I don't know," Shiv said, "but after seeing it…" He hesitated. "I still got a problem with Roland. But imagining someone doing something like that to you or Adam? I…" Shiv's hand shook slightly. What would he do? “I'm afraid of what I might do. Roland was too kind to kill a child and too hateful to just let me go. I might’ve been more hateful than kind.”

As Shiv departed the infirmary, he called out to Valor and Can Hu, getting their attention. "Valor," Shiv said. “Thanks for earlier. I didn’t know how I was going to do that shit without your help. No idea where to start at all.”

Valor nodded in response. "You did fine. Your inexperience was a barrier, but you did well to call me. And you did well thereafter. You as well, Uva."

She immediately adopted a posture as if she were standing in salute for a superior officer.

"Will Adam be well?" Can Hu asked, a note of reverberating concern in its voice. "I have seen humans reunite with those they thought long lost. I must admit that the circumstances that exist in my data banks are not nearly..." Can Hu paused as he looked at Shiv, "...as novel as what resulted from you, Pathbearer."

"Yeah, that's becoming a running theme with me by this point," Shiv said. His arms were folded, he shrugged, but he was considering the implications of Rose's resurrection. Was it truly Rose? Was it just a copy of her, or was this something that Udraal had planned all along? Maybe Udraal was the only one that knew. Nonetheless, he would let Adam have his moment first. All the questionable and miserable business could wait.

"But then, we still must talk of your new skill," Valor said, sounding uncertain. "This skill, this merged ability of yours, Shiv. You understand it?"

"Yeah," Shiv replied. "It's kind of like becoming your own magic in a weird way." He summoned a little bit of Vitae to his palm, and as the swirling mass of red and white shivered, he drew it back inside of himself before he lost too much vitality. "Still don't know what this really does," Shiv began. "It reaches out for me. It's like a solid."

"A solid?" Valor asked. "You can touch things with it?”

"Yeah, I spiked Adam in the chest earlier. I put a hole through a basilisk. It's about as hard as I am, moves as fast as I can, and I can direct it using my gravitic field. But inside me," Shiv patted his chest, "there's an active field—a mana field—that keeps it stable, keeps it from leaking out. Even after I die now, it's like a stasis zone for vitality."

"And your Revenant form before, what was the difference?"

Shiv considered that. "Before, I was just like a faint outline of myself. I couldn't really move because I didn't have mass. My bound equipment still followed me. I could strike people with that. But aside from my equipment and my magic, I didn't really have any way of affecting someone. When I resurrected, a layer of shadows would form over me and, well, it would hatch and I'd be back. Now, the red just stitches me back together. Well, it fills up, and then I surface from it. All this weird metaphysical shit's giving me a headache."

"This is good," Valor said. "This is useful information. Was your shadowy cocoon before as large as your field now?"

Shiv considered that. "Yeah, just about.”

"Then I suspect it was simply the immature form of your current metamorphosis. A frame being built before the evolution, so to speak. And right now, you have ripened the skill. It has become something active, something properly mature."

"That's not the only thing," Shiv said. He remembered his conversation with the Vicar. Especially the part that had to do with Udraal Thann. "Valor. I had an encounter with Sullain. We exchanged words while time was frozen—Alright, maybe exchanging words wasn't all of it. He talked to me real nicely at first after he set me on fire with his Necromantic sun. And then he started trying to hash my name, trying to figure things out for me. He was pretty pissed off when I revealed what Havel was trying to pull on him. So maybe we have an opening there.”

“Good,” Valor said. “The more at odds our enemies are, the better.”

“But, uh, he has some of my Vitae. He literally pulled it out of me when I exploded. After I went off, he caught it somehow. Just like he managed to capture some of Roland's arrows. Arrows that removed me from existence in a second. He’s godsdamn powerful. I felt like an insect next to him. What kind of Magical Skills does he even have?”

Valor paused as he strained himself, trying to remember something. “His ability to control magic was... Omnimancy," Valor suddenly said. The flames in his eyes flickered. "The control of all magics."