After an orc is slain, his soul is cleansed by the System as he passes through the Challenger and returns to the Tutorial. He is stripped down back to zero, but he does retain one skill, one and only one, and that is the skill that matters to them above all others.
Perfect Memory.
Orcs possessing Perfect Memory meansthat they will never forget anything they don’t want to forget, no matter how much time passes, be it a face or a number of uncountable digits.
If an orc claims to have forgotten something, he is either lying or brain-damaged beyond repair.
Psychomancers have, of course, tried to rip out an orc's memories. The outcomes of these attempts are usually mixed to the extreme, for though you can shatter an orc's mind, the memories still pass on to their next incarnation. The memories they want to mark as “perfect” are bound to the soul. It is like a story ingrained within them, woven into their fundamental existence by the System to ensure they retain all of their past experiences.
And that is the worst of our problems: With every death we inflict upon them, they learn more and more. They understand our patterns. They know where they were bombed to death.
Over time, they will know all of our strategies. They know half of our damn names already. I've been greeted by them more than once.
Our only advantage is that they don't like sharing this information with each other. They don't care about each other. They're not an army; they're a group of violent, hyper-intelligent sociopaths who are competing with each other to finally breach our walls and kill us all. Cooperation doesn't exist between them. That's all we got. But individually, they're still advancing. They don't forget.
With every passing summer, it's getting worse. Our finest Artillerists are getting their throats slit in the middle of the night. Fuck. That’s not even the worst of it. They turned Mara into a suicide bomber by kidnapping her kid. We remember Captain Mara, don’t we? Never needed to fire more than twice to hit a target? Yeah. Now we don’t talk about her. But I need to.
The orcs are starting to use more stealth. More deception. We need to start countering now. Our artillery and bombardment strategy is not going to last. Not another 10 years. We need to beat the orcs to their adaptation before they overcome us, and that means getting better at stealth or counter-stealth before they get good enough to work through all of our leadership. Before we wake up one night with a big, ugly, green-skinned bastard wearing our flayed child's face as a mask.
They're changing, so we gotta change as well. So we gotta go on the offensive. Doing nothing is only going to make more Maras. And we cannot afford that.
-Hero-Ranger Morgan Munny to Lone Star High Command
115 (I)
Adamantine
The orc didn't have a Chronomancy skill.
What the orc did have, however, was a set of compact Chronomancy wardings so powerful that a golden ripple cleaved straight through Shiv’s temporal shell the moment he surged forward.
Chronomancy burst free from Shiv’s body, but a small part of it clung to him, trying to cover his entire person. Shiv growled and cast himself back in time. He reverted to the place he was five seconds ago and flung his Skysplitter into the distance just as his temporal shell shattered.
A beam of fire slashed just above Shiv’s head. He spiked himself down and raised his arm in front of his face just in time to feel a Necromancy-infused arrow bounce off his Magebreaker instead of obliterating his soul. Shit!
He needed to get out of here. As his knife exploded through a half-collapsed overpass, the orc barked out a laugh. "Chronomancy!" he cried out. "Such a delightful skill, isn't it?"
Shiv didn't listen to the rest of the orc's speech. He didn't have the time nor the interest. He teleported to his knife—and promptly slammed blade-first into a rising wall of adamantine that exploded out from the cracked pavement. Shiv’s blade left a dent in the wall, but he pulled his gravitic field back—
The orc burst free from the adamantine like a diver surfacing from water and roundhouse-kicked Shiv right in the side of the head.
Shiv reeled backward, his vision spinning. The orc hit as hard as an entity-possessed Confriga. But Shiv wasn’t the same Pathbearer who went into the fight unprepared and underpowered either. He halted himself in place as he gripped himself using his gravitic field and then drove his head forward. He slammed his helmet into the orc’s chest, and the big bastard welcomed it with a hearty laugh.
He barely took a single step back.
Both blurred into motion. Shiv shot low to rip the orc’s legs out from under them. The orc jumped up. A column of adamantine shot up from the ground below. Shiv spiked his gravitic field and rolled, twisting to the side. The column slammed into the orc’s chestplate. But it didn’t launch him back. Instead, it splashed apart and merged with his armor.
Shiv ground across the ground, sliding to a halt as he glared at his new enemy.
"Quite the hit," the orc complimented, casually brushing dust off his chestplate. A beam flashed behind the orc—corrosive mana filled the air. But the orc just lifted a hand, and a curving wall of adamantine exploded out from the ground and intercepted the strike. Shiv blinked as a great and metallic dome hatched free from parting streets and collapsing buildings. The entire structure took up a kilometer of space. Patches of decay spread through portions of the dome, but then more layers within rose, reinforcing the whole bunker like an onion.
"There," the orc said, letting out a sigh of annoyance, "that should keep them away, at least for a little bit. Just long enough for us to indulge in this… chat.
”Shiv studied the orc again. The brute had his faceplate down now, and at the top of his helmet a gleaming spike infused with glowing mana poked out like some kind of unicorn horn. The colors within the horn oscillated between gold and black, with static lining its edges.
That must be the source of his wards, Shiv realized. He'd probably need to target that if he wanted to use his Chronomancy freely and extract himself from the fight. And that's what he was going to try to do: get free of the orc. As much as he wanted to kick the thing's ass, he had to finish his scouting run. That, and the longer this orc kept him in place, the worse things would get for him.
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The Necrotechs were probably amassing more forces this very second.
Adam was likely getting all kinds of useful information now about how many enemies there were and how they could respond to a fast-moving threat. But considering the sheer variety of Pathbearers and monsters the Necrotechs had massed to intercept him, Shiv guessed that it wouldn't be long until he faced some new breed of bullshit, like someone with a Necromancy-Psychomancy Skill Fusion.
Yeah. I don’t think I have a chance of surviving that, Shiv thought to himself. New plan. Drain some of the orc's vitality, break his horn, and then try to escape this place. Maybe use Outside Context Problem to make him forget about my existence and drill through the ground to escape while he’s distracted.
"I wish to see—” The orc’s words went unheard as Shiv spiked his gravity field 30 times. The world around him slowed, his reflexes surged, and his speed exploded. He crashed against the orc as his inertial sheath thundered with building energy.
The orc was driven back, and Deathless slashed out at the orc. His cut flicked toward the horn—only to be deflected. A blade of liquid metal splashed out from the orc's helmet and parried Shiv’s slash. It then spilled around Shiv’s arm and hardened around him. A dozen liquid metal hammers exploded out from the orc's armor as well. They crashed into Shiv, impacting like heavy blows at first, but then they also turned fluid, congealing around his body. Then, they hardened into dense clumps of metal.
The orc made a pulling gesture. Shiv stumbled as a rush of force pulled him off balance. The orc made a fist—but never got to swing it as Shiv detonated his inertial sheath. The kinetic discharge flung the orc through a building, and Shiv blasted in after them. They crashed through debris as Shiv swung his Skysplitter—only for the orc to phase through the attack by turning into mist and disappear from sight.
"Really?" Shiv growled under his breath as he stabbed his feet through the ground, grinding himself to a brutal halt. “Always some bullshit with orcs.” It was bad enough that the orcs were big and durable and clever. Why did all of them have to have more than one magical skill too?
The Challenger is amused by your outrage.
"Yeah, laugh it up," Shiv spat at the unseen god. He pointed his knife up into the air. “I’m gonna kill this one too.”
Just then, a rush of mist condensed beside Shiv. The orc reappeared a few meters away and opened his mouth.
Shiv wasn’t interested in talking.
He triggered his Outside Context Problem. He vanished from existence, slipping back into his own vitae. The orc's eyes widened, looked confused, and then Shiv advanced on the orc, his knife drawn, Creeping Void active. Darkness began to flood the world around him, a darkness that wasn't yet observable by the orc as it was layered in Shiv’s vitae. But it manifested as Shiv blasted toward the brute and finally inflicted two slashes while sapping his vitality. The first sparked across the orc’s throat, while the other took a chip out from the horn on the brute’s head.
But the horn didn't break, not even with Shiv’s Deepest Edge. A burst of white and red exploded out from Shiv as the orc lurched back, suddenly startled by the Deathless's reappearance. Shiv drove his blade into the orc’s chest, and the huge bastard staggered back. But Shiv’s cuts were stunning more than they were bleeding.
Master-Tier Toughness. At least.
The orc pointed a finger down. Shiv found himself pulled toward the ground by a crushing force as all the metal clumps on his body shuddered with force. The orc slammed into the Deathless, wrapping his massive hand around Shiv's entire body. Shiv brought an elbow down against the orc's forearm. A deafening ring echoed through the world as a shockwave spread between them.
The orc barely budged. He laughed. “My turn.”
An adamantine spike exploded out from under the Deathless, slamming right between his legs. Shiv hissed as pain exploded in a place he didn't much enjoy getting hit. But Adamantine Adaption made all of Shiv durable, so the hit just pissed him off more than anything. He cast a bone drill into the orc’s head as he blasted into the orc, driving them both through another building.
Shiv fed his anger into his Adamantine Adaption, and he spiked his gravity field another twenty times, letting it build as he held the orc’s arm in place with his gravitic field. Shiv’s skin tore. The orc unleashed a barrage of adamantine arrows at Shiv via his armor. Shiv discharged his Inertial Overdrive in response.
The blast wave was devastating; the air combusted, everything around him dissolved, and even the adamantine curved outward. The explosion shredded the orc's armor and sent the brute flying backward. Shiv thought he had the orc dead to rights, so he charged after his adversary, seeking to end the orc for good or at least chop the horn off his head. Yet, as he accelerated, the orc’s armor turned to a mercury puddle and splattered onto the ground.
The horn atop the helmet was gone as well. Along with the orc.
Shiv blinked, confused, when suddenly an adamantine harpoon speared down from above, chipping a piece from his left shoulder. The force of the impact sent Shiv tumbling forward into a roll. He plowed through concrete, spinning head over heels several times before he finally stabilized himself with a downward spike of his gravity field.
As he ground to a halt again, he looked up, and the orc descended on an adamantine platform, the same platform Shiv saw earlier, layered with focus crystals on the bottom. "You're not the only one with many tricks, Deathless," the orc said, waggling a finger. Behind the orc hovered a small arsenal of weapons: blades, hammers, arrows, spears, even whips.
"I don't have time for this shit," Shiv muttered. “You mind doing me a favor and just killing yourself? I got a scouting run to finish and a certain Vicar I need to figure out how to kill.”
The orc shook a finger. "Ah, before anything like that, I must see your measure. I am ever so curious about why the Challenger is interested in you. You bested one of my brethren, but many have done the same. So why you?" The orc cocked his head at Shiv. "You aren’t even the most brutal human I’ve met. So why you?”
By this point, the entirety of the dome was shrouded with the miasma from Creeping Void. Shiv also had his Minor Illusion active and his Chameleon serving as an additional layer of stealth. The orc looked on in his general direction still. The damned gray-skinned beast seemed to know exactly where he was.
Shiv shifted his weight, and the orc’s eyes narrowed. That meant he wasn't just aware of his location, but could sense his very movements. Shiv wasn't sure how, but then he realized that it was probably the ground.
Geomancer, Shiv thought, he can sense me through the ground. Then, Shiv felt at the clumps of adamantine that were layered around his armor. He can probably feel that too.
Shiv rose into the air, hovering slowly as he considered how to approach his enemy. The horn was harder than he expected to cut through, and the orc, well… The orc was an orc: cruel, intelligent, magically attuned with plenty of his own tricks.
Shiv thought back to his fight with 811 as he considered how he was going to solve this problem. If there was one thing common between orcs, it was that they loved picking fights. They loved coming after him over and over again. Shiv wondered how he could use that against this orc…
Alright, so he's a Geomancer. His armor can be turned into liquid metal and shape weapons from inside itself. He can apparently just vanish and reappear somewhere else—either as a gust of mist or using his metal… Wait, everything around me is adamantine. He's probably using that as some kind of close-range teleportation anchor. What kind of Skill felling Fusion results lets a Pathbearer do that? Agh. What I need to do is stop time and hit him with everything I have all at once. My maximum inertial detonation can damage adamantine. I just can’t give him a chance to run.
"You know," Shiv said, pointing his blade at the orc as he continued thinking about an easy solution to his orc problem, "An orc being here certainly explains a lot. I found it pretty strange how you guys kept finding me. I guess I have my answer now."
The orc let out a barking laugh. "Oh, no, no. I didn't tell the others. I didn't want them to share in my fun. I wanted to see how you performed first. Them finding you is because you’re loud. And their Diviners are competent.”