119 (II)
Offer [I]
“All magics?” Shiv gawked in disbelief. "You mean he has every single Magical Skill fused together into one?"
"It’s hard to remember, but… I believe so," Valor replied. The Legendary Pathbearer sounded uncertain, but worried nonetheless. "This is not good, Shiv. I cannot even conceive what he might be able to do with your Vitae.”
"Yeah, what's worse is that he mentioned Udraal by name. He wanted to return me to him, like I'm some kind of lost dog."
And that made Valor look away. A noise of discomfort escaped from him as he looked up at the Mana Core. His gaze, however, clearly ran further into his own past rather than the light of the present. "Udraal," Valor whispered, "what have you been doing?"
"Yeah, I need to know the answer to that question too," Shiv said. "When we meet your son, Valor, I’ll have a lot of things to ask him, and I might not ask him so nicely."
Valor slowly turned and regarded Shiv. "Shiv, I pray that you do not meet my son. Not now, not ever."
A growl almost escaped Shiv, but he controlled himself. He took a deep breath. "Valor, I know he's your son—”
"No, you misunderstand, Shiv," Valor interrupted. "This is not me expressing protectiveness or fatherly love, though I do care for him still. But no, this is me expressing concern for you. My son isn't just a Unique and Legendary Pathbearer. He is one of the few people I fear in all of Integration. Let that statement stand for itself."
Shiv nodded, accepting Valor's statement, but not bending before it. Valor knew his son, Shiv didn't, and more importantly, this was going to be an unavoidable issue. "I don't think we can avoid this. With how much his name has come up, this meeting is bound to happen sooner or later.”
"It best be later," Valor said, with more than a little weight behind his words. "You—we—are not ready."
"Well, I wasn't ready for Sullain either," Shiv said, getting a bit frustrated with the direction this conversation was taking. "And I had to deal with him anyway. It's not up to me. The System is intent on throwing me against people who can contend with gods. Shit, it’s thrown a forgotten god at me already, and she didn't feel as powerful as Sullain." Shiv let out a stressful breath.
Valor wasn't looking away from him. At that moment, Shiv realized Valor was suffering too. Suffering from a similar problem as Adam. Where Adam was worried, terrified that something would happen and take his returned mother from him, Valor didn't want to face his son at all. He still cared for him, apparently. But there was terror in that as well. Not the kind of terror one would have for a monster, Shiv knew. But one that you would have for someone who had wounded you too deeply.
Psychology 7 > 8
Fuck me, everyone’s a mess in their own way, Shiv thought. He'd heard that statement from Georges once. He didn't ask the Chef why that was. Georges had his own past, and to Shiv, it never felt right to pry. Might be the same business with Valor.
But in Udraal’s case, it was a necessary preparation for an inevitable conflict. And it is going to be a conflict, Shiv told himself. It was looking more and more like his parents went to Udraal to see the ritual done. Or Udraal influenced it somehow, maybe even caused it. Whatever the case, he needed to find out. And on his own terms, not Udraal's or anyone else's.
"Shiv," Valor said once more, "you need to... No, we need to understand your new capabilities. Much is at stake now. With the Vicar possessing some of your Vitae, he may soon discover another weapon he could use against Blackedge. He may no longer have the Animancy Core, but he remains a Legend of theoretical and practical magic. We must comprehend the limits and functions of your new skill before he does.”
"And we're also gonna need an army," Shiv said. "There were a ton of Necros. And it wasn't just a few stragglers. Their operation makes Confriga’s look like a joke. They had riders that controlled time dragons, Valor. They deployed in seconds after they detected me, and they kept finding me. I managed to make it all the way to Blackedge, but every damn step was a fight. Always one mistake from dying. And then I ended up getting lit up at the end anyway."
Shiv grimaced as he also recalled being pinned in place by Sullain. The Vicar's powers of magic were beyond description. He had control over Chronomancy, Biomancy, Pyromancy, and countless more. And they were all practically the same discipline to him. If what Valor said was true, if he truly was an Omnimancer, then, well, how the hell were they supposed to even figure out how to kill Sullain?
“Not alone,” Uva said.
Shiv grunted. “Well, we're gonna need to deal with the Vicar. We're gonna need to figure out my Vitae. We're gonna need to find an army to deal with his. And more likely than not, we're going to need to find a way to help all the people at Blackedge escape their current encirclement. But doing all that is gonna take… I don't even know what it's gonna take. But it's a lot. And I have no idea where to begin."
Valor paused and slowly looked at Can Hu. "Shiv, for your Vitae, I think we have a prime candidate to test your new skill on.”
Slowly, Can Hu turned to regard Valor, joints screeching. Its eyes flashed, mimicking a blink. "Are you sure this is wise, Legend Valor?"
"I think there is nothing wiser, my friend," Valor said. "You have sustained severe damage to your soul. Your skills are shattered, and your very being is sundered to its foundations. Shiv shed Necromancy damage. Even that shouldn't be possible, and with his changed nature and his Vitae, he might be capable of more than just the impossible. He reached into Rose and cycled the damage from her into himself. That is beyond Animancy in some ways. More direct. Let us see what he can do for you.”
Shiv looked between Can Hu and Valor as a heavy weight settled on him. "So what, I'm going to be able to fix Can Hu?"
"I wouldn't be absolutely certain about that," Valor said, tempering everyone's expectations. "But I wouldn't say otherwise, either. We must discover your limits first."
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Shiv rolled his neck and looked at the Penitent. "Alright, then, why don't we start now? I'm ready."
Can Hu slowly looked toward Valor, and the green in his optics shrank. "I… I am willing to try anything.”
"Was about to say the same thing," Shiv said. And immediately, he channeled a stream of red and white into the Penitent. Its vitality was brutally damaged. Even before Shiv truly suffused his Vitae into Can Hu, he could feel the many gaps and pieces of its soul that were outright missing. It was like there were sections of the Penitent that had been torn away by jagged claws. Not destroyed, not disfigured, removed entirely.
Shiv had no idea how Can Hu was still holding together. To fully conceptualize the unnatural state of Can Hu's vitality, Shiv had to think of a pond. A pond that had sections of absence where water simply didn't exist. But the moment Shiv pressed against the holes in the pond, he found his Vitae sinking into the absence, filling them at an alarming rate and flooding the nothing with his white and red.
Shiv’s vitality plunged.He groaned, and Can Hu brightened with new life.
Vitaemancy 55 > 56
The Penitent shook and shuddered, but rather than its body sounding like screaming metal every time it moved, there came a stable mechanical whirr for once, and Can Hu moved like its body was lubricated. There was no resistance as it took a few steps back.
But then Shiv’s vitality began to run dry, and the space within Can Hu grew ever more unstable. Parts of the Penitent filled with vitality. As it did, Shiv could feel shapes at the center. Broken shapes. The Vitae itself wasn't enough. Shiv didn't really know what he was doing with the shapes, and so the moment he stopped focusing, his Vitae was ejected from the cracked remnants of what he assumed to be Can Hu's skills.
Shiv was about to keep trying, but a rush of lethargy took him. His Vitae receded back into his body as he tried not to collapse. Chills shot through his every sinew. "I felt something," Shiv gasped as Uva held him up using her shield. "I managed to reach in and touch some of what was broken. I just—I don't know how to put it back together."
Can Hu felt at itself. It said nothing for a moment, but Shiv could practically taste the Penitent's astonishment. Valor, likewise, seemed positively ecstatic. He drifted beside Shiv, examining him up and down, while casting glimpses at Can Hu as well. "No, no, this is a great outcome. This is more than great. This is fantastic. Do not be discouraged. This is exactly the outcome we want," Valor said. "I assumed it wouldn't be easy. Even if I had Animancy, it wouldn't be possible. You couldn't put something so complicated back together. But the fact that you reached in, that you managed to interface with it, that you managed to touch it... What you have here is... I do not fully understand, but it can function analogously to Animancy. But Animancy is not something I could wield like a solid object. Like a surgeon’s tools.”
Valor looked down at his hands, and a crackle of Necromancy pulsed there. "Animancy is the shape of the soul itself. You can modify it. It is not controlled by vitality, it is not interwoven with vitality, it is not a living thing. You can manipulate the conditions of one's soul. You can influence the development of a skill on higher levels and deeper understandings. You can even inflict indelible harm on one's existence. But what you are doing here… It seems that you are inflicting some of your own existence on someone else, restructuring and resurrecting or—”
"Valor," Can Hu cut in. "The skill doesn't say that it's broken anymore."
Valor went entirely still.
Shiv's eyes widened. "I fixed it?"
"No," Can Hu replied. "It says damaged."
"Damaged," Shiv echoed. "That's better than being broken, right?"
"This is incredible," Valor breathed. "This is..." And then Valor regarded Shiv, and his eyes flickered. "No. No. I think I understand now. This is... You are an incubator for souls and resurrections. My son has… You have made to return not only broken lives, but broken skills as well. Broken souls." The Legendary Pathbearer shook off his stupor. "I need that shard of myself more than ever. The part of myself that allows me to use Animancy. I cannot guide you properly without it. I cannot truly give you a mirror to work off of if I do not have the skill myself. But until then, until then, I can guide you on your discovery. And you need to continue treating Can Hu. Continue doing what you did just now."
"I'll get back to it the moment I recover," Shiv said. "I could just go out and drain some unlucky critters in the Umbral Wilderness, then come back again."
"Yes, yes," Valor said, "do that, do that as fast as possible. See if you can fill every single one of its soul wounds. It's like a transplantation. You’re a universal soul donor, a perfect soul donor.”
Valor shuddered, and his gaze turned distant again. “Udraal, how did you achieve this?”
Shiv let out a grunt and slowly began to trudge towards the Abyssal Gateway again.
"You're going already?" Uva asked.
"Yeah," Shiv said, "no time like the present, right?" She looked at Valor and Can Hu before she followed Shiv.
"It won't be long," Shiv said. "I'm just going to find..."
"I'll go with you," Uva said. "I think there are some other tests we can run on proper enemies."
"Proper enemies," Shiv said, his curiosity piqued.
"Vampires," she said very simply. "The First Blood will attack us at some point. I wish for that point to be delayed for as long as possible. And there are few who deserve whatever foulness might be inflicted by your new skill.”
“Uva. That’s kind of dark, but I also find it weirdly hot.”
Uva smirked with pride.
And just then, another notification popped up before Shiv. But this one was accompanied by a powerful pulse of weight.
The Challenger demands that you make a decision.
"Godsdamn it, can't you wait?" Shiv snarled.
"What?" Uva asked.
"The Challenger, he keeps wanting me to talk to him. He's really trying to push this offer on me."
Uva narrowed her eyes. "Have you decided?"
"I don't even know what the offer is," Shiv snapped. "What about you? How's the Dreamtaker? She pushing anything on you?"
Uva was hesitant for a moment. "Not nearly as aggressively as your Challenger."
"He's not my Challenger," Shiv growled. "He's just... an asshole god I'm gonna have to deal with. And probably eventually have to kick the ass of." Shiv sighed. "Now, if I can figure out how to kill Vicar Sullain first, then maybe I can move on to imagining how I can kill an actual god."
"Then, before we leave, I think you should at least talk to him."
Shiv paused. "What?"
“We will need to know what he offers sooner or later anyway,” Uva said. “You do not need to accept. You just need to learn. When we debrief, it’s best that we do so with all the information possible. So. I will talkto my personal problem, and you go talk to your Challenger."
"Stop calling him my Challenger.”
Uva pressed her lips together. “Considering he is willing to offer some of his forces to us? I suspect that makes him very much your Challenger right now. I have not heard of many gods offering the boon of an army, and we are sorely in need of allies.”
“Godsdammit,” Shiv breathed. “Fine. Hey, Challenger. Asshole. I got a moment. Let’s—”
Shiv vanished from the gate.