49 (II)
Jealousy [III]
As the Magebreaker crashed against the mana, a detonation of translucent, white force burst out from the creature’s mangled wound, and it let out a cry. Thank the System that you’re bound to me, Shiv thought.
The Jealousy snarled. “There, still alive! Hidden! Inside me! Tricked me! Won’t trick me again!”
Suddenly, he felt the carapace around the creature bubble and come back together. He blinked in disbelief as its flesh rapidly knit itself closed—what was ruined and carved was enclosed, healing perfectly.
This isn’t Biomancy, Shiv realized. He failed to detect any attuned mana guiding the process. Is this part of its Master-Tier Toughness? Some kind of advanced healing skill? Or just its natural biology?
Whatever it was, it presented a new problem for Shiv. He was now enshrouded in a mass of recently healed flesh, lodged next to his old body. His cocoon accelerated toward that moment where he would attain resurrection—but once he did, he would be pinned in place. Between the creature’s Psychomancy and Hydromancy, he didn’t like his odds of surviving for very long while trapped here, and of keeping his mind unbroken thereafter.
Earlier, Shiv had wanted Tran to add a final Binding Enchantment to his mask. But the Slayer didn’t have the right skill to invest, and the mask didn’t have capacity for any more Enchantments after Self-Mending. Right now, if Shiv resurrected, he would likely be immediately killed again. His Magebreaker was in a pretty precarious state as well—it was shaking violently on his hand; tremoring as if on the verge of a volcanic eruption. He guessed it had one to two blocks more left in it before it actually started taking damage.
To counter the Jealousy’s Heroic-Tier Psychomancy, he needed to go on the offensive. He needed to keep it off balance. So he slammed his Woundeater field against the monster as hard as he could. A lashing wyrm exploded out from his field, coiling and snapping like a serpent. It rammed headfirst against the Jealousy’s Magical Resistance. The Greater Demon flinched while its physical body mended itself.
Shiv felt a slight fracture form in its magical defenses. But only a slight one.
This entire fight, they were mirrors to each other—one, a monster of the mind and a beast of titanic proportions; the other, a man beyond death and monster-like in his own skill composition. As the beginnings of mana strain affected Shiv’s Biomancy, he struck once more, ignoring the discomfort. He needed it off-balance as he resurrected, and he needed as much time as he could to get to his mask and escape from the creature’s insides.
His new plan was simple: hit-and-run, focusing mainly on wearing down the monster’s Magical Resistance. After that broke, he would flood it with his wounds and bring it down, using his own damage as the catalyst of its destruction.
And when resurrected, he needed to keep a distance from the monster’s immediate vicinity. He couldn’t risk facing the Hydromancy until he had the skill himself.
Shiv’s resurrective cocoon hatched. He felt the hard but slick inner flesh of the Jealousy’s eye clamp down around his person. He sensed another rushing wave of Psychomancy coming at him. And then, with a rush of violence, of effort, of tearing hands aided by a slicing bone dagger, he pushed his way through to his original body and commanded the skull helmet on his old corpse to part. He didn’t bother with the rest of the exoskeleton—he wouldn’t have time to perform the meticulous action of assembling it back around his current self. He just pulled the mask off and braced for the next onrush of Psychomancy.
With how violently his Magebreaker Gauntlet was still vibrating, though, he decided to do something risky. He decided to take this blow using his mask. It’s the only instrument I have protecting my mind from complete annihilation, he thought. But if the gauntlet broke, he wouldn’t have anything to actively protect himself with while dead.
He needed to use them in tandem to prolong his combat longevity.
A spearing lance of mind magic crashed against his Mask of False Paths. Shiv felt another crack run through the item, and a splash of vicious, hateful thought leaked into his mind. He caught glimpses of the world through the Jealousy’s perspective: everything in vibrant color, hyper-detail, vivid wavelengths of thought. This was a creature designed to hunt those who could think, designed to feed off mind and memory.
But that wasn’t how it thought about Shiv, who was lodged inside it. Shiv, it considered another monster—something it needed to destroy, to mutilate and obliterate beyond form or function. It didn’t even want to eat Shiv’s mind. It just wanted him gone.
Equipment: [Mask of False Paths]
Condition: Moderately Damaged
And that made Shiv realize something else: the creature’s courage was fraying. His Dread Aura was pushing up against the breaches in its bravery, briefly affecting its concentration. But the focus crystals proved greater, and so he was forced to endure the mind magic attack in its entirety, as he punched, sliced, and burst out of the Jealousy’s eye.
It let out a shriek just as he felt a strange presence seize his body once more—but he was free. He had cut his way back out of the inner eye. Even as it ripped out all the water in him and rendered him a shriveled corpse, he was free.
He plunged lifelessly from the Jealousy, and his Revenant form separated from his second body in midair.
Skill Gained: Hydromancy 1 (Initiate)
That was another quick death. Shiv winced at this performance, but at least he got Hydromancy from the ordeal. Hydromancy and nothing else. It was the only reason he was dead, after all. Now, he could see the Jealousy’s Hydromancy field, and it was practically only a bit larger than its body. Though considering its entire width was more than two hundred meters, it was still pretty wide. He was dealing with High Adept-Tier Hydromancy. At least.
As he fell, he looked up at the Jealousy, which eyed his corpse briefly before its baleful glare turned on his barely visible Revenant. “How…” the Jealousy hissed, its mind tinged with outrage and genuine confusion. “How is this possible? Dead, but spirit still here?”
It gathered all the mana it had, drawing in a building singularity of Psychomancy.
Shiv frowned. He didn’t like the look of that. At least his gauntlet wasn’t vibrating so fast anymore. Tremors and quivers still ran through its structure, but it was returning to baseline. The gauntlet recovered fast—but with how powerful this coming attack would be, Shiv found himself worried. The Magebreaker might break, which would leave him with only his mask.
Worse than that were all the slaves below. The building torrent of mind mana didn't look like it would discriminate much when it came to shredding thought. If he didn’t block that, he was sure a good portion of them would be mentally torn asunder.
And I’m probably going to need to drain some of their vitality as well. It was an ugly thought, but he had no choice. The Jealousy was far away, and he needed to get back into the fight, no matter what.
As soon as Shiv landed among the slaves, he winced as he saw more than a few people scattered where his corpse had impacted the ground. He launched a wyrm at the wounded, eating their injuries before he cast the spell into his old corpse. At once, the body’s leg, back, and arms folded in different directions. All the ribs inside the corpse broke as well.
Woundeater was a golden skill to have, offensively and defensively.
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Most of the other slaves were injured too, most of them lying on the ground, a great number clutching their ears, nursing wounds. Shrapnel falling from above and the deafening noise of the clash between a Master Pathbearer and a Greater Demon had inflicted significant harm. Once again, people were suffering. Collateral damage came with every clash—but this time, there was nothing he could have done. This enemy was trapped with him and trapped with them as well. The only way he could save most of them was by killing it—killing it before it could truly do all the harm it wanted.
He reached out, briefly tapping his hand against random slaves as he rushed through the masses. It was still enough to make them cry out in immense pain. His stomach twisted in regret, but he forced the discomfort down. If he didn’t come back, they were as good as dead anyway. He could only reduce the harm being caused.
His shadow congealed around him.
Above, the Jealousy screamed,
“Break. Break. Nightmare, find you. Nightmare, rip into your soul. Pull your mind apart. Break, undying creature. Break!”
It spat every word with human intensity, human vitriol, human fear.
Shiv stopped halfway through draining another slave, planted his feet, and looked up. A needle-thin spell was taking shape right at the center of the Jealousy’s great eye. Unlike what he'd initially assumed, what once was a colossal gathering of chaotic mind mana had now been disciplined and shaped into a small, gleaming shard—a concentration not of a savage, incoherent beast, but something beyond even a Master of Psychomancy.
Shit! Shiv cursed.
He immediately reached out again, seizing the last bits of vitality he needed to return. And just as he hatched from his third cocoon, the Jealousy unleashed its great attack. A thin needle connected to a psionic thread shot out, twisting through the air to strike Shiv. He anticipated it, his Momentum Core allowing him to easily keep up with its movements. But before it came for him, it suddenly arced at an extreme angle, something impossible for anything that possessed mass to do.
Instead of striking him directly, it curved around him, threading through dozens of slaves in his vicinity. Their minds popped and expanded in blasts of mind mana. Psionic echoes wailed from each of the struck slaves, their cognitions sacrificed to channel the coming spell.
Shiv twisted his Magebreaker, striking the needle that threaded through so many minds as it finally came for him.
His gauntlet rattled and practically broke off his arm. For a second, he thought it shattered entirely—but it held together, if only just barely. Even so, so much force rushed through that his left arm was dislocated and almost torn off his shoulder.
Shiv cried out, but the surrounding blasts born of the slaves were not unmoving either. They slammed inward, crashing where Shiv was, collapsing to that point where the needle had been. And though he parried one magical attack at the cost of a limb, the others slammed all around him, drowning him under a magical assault.
His mask nearly fractured in half. This time, shrapnel composed of mind mana speared into his consciousness.
Shiv staggered backward, letting out a scream of absolute agony as he instinctively clutched at his head. His thoughts felt shredded. For a brief moment, he couldn’t remember who he was—but his instincts to fight, to move, to survive, kept him going. His thoughts jumped from item to item as he pulled things out of his cloak, as he launched himself into the air. A new pre-made exoskeleton collapsed into place around him as he let out a pained breath and examined both his essential items.
Equipment: [Gauntlet of the Magebreaker]
Condition: Severely Damaged
Equipment: [Mask of False Paths]
Condition: Extremely Damaged
Well, this… this is going south fast. Another… hit like any of that… and I’ll be a gibbering wreck, Deathless or not…
Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw the flash of a massive shadow rising up to strike him. To Shiv’s disbelief, the Jealousy had twisted a limb along the side of the chamber and intended to crush him with it from behind. He sensed it entering his Woundeater field before it ever grew close. But this was a mistake on the part of the Greater Demon. He was going to rip this limb apart and drink all its momentum in the process.
Then, instead of plunging back into the beast’s eye, he was going to strafe it, just dart along its vicinity beyond the reach of its Hydromancy, and cast his wounds against its Magical Resistance until he could harm it directly.
But then, the Jealousy reminded him that it was no simple creature of brutality, that it was a complicated creature of brutality, and it did so by unleashing another attack at the same time.
It channeled a massive stream of hyper-accelerated Hydromancy at him again. The water slashed out through the air, and Shiv found himself cursing. The cursing intensified by a magnitude when it also flung two smaller needles shaped from Psychomancy down at the slaves. It came at him from three different angles of attack—the Psychomancy he could barely defend against at the cost of losing his gauntlet or mask, the jet he needed to drink the momentum from for speed, and the tentacle he had to counter in case it pinned him against the wall and let the other attacks finish him.
The Deathless’s mind was an overwhelmed whirlwind, trapped by indecision—confused as to what the right course of action was. He was still thinking, still lost as the Hydrokinetic jet crashed into him, blasting him backward. He absorbed its momentum; it filled his core rapidly. But then came its arm, and he stuck out his other limb, preparing to intercept the blow. It was the size of a coiling tower, and it enshadowed him immediately, like a tree falling on an ant. Shiv didn’t even have time to shape a Biomancy spell before it hit.
His Adamantine Adaption kept him from physical harm, but the Psychomancy needles were already plunging through the slaves and building up homing mind mana explosions. He was being blasted off course, swatted aside like the flea he was, because he didn’t have the strength to push back against his enemy—until finally his Momentum Core filled.
In that moment, he conceived a desperate, instinctive plan. The Jealousy was being empowered by the focus crystals it clutched. That’s what kept its spells going, even through all the pain… He needed those broken, and he needed the monster off-balance so it couldn’t use its Psychomancy against him. He couldn’t take another hit from that—and more slaves would die every second he hesitated.
Shiv aimed his Momentum Core discharge at the massive limb crashing against him. He aimed it so that he would pull the entire tentacle at a sharp angle, wrenching it out of place. There was a point where this limb couldn’t curve anymore and would end up smashing into another—and that was his mad plan: to use one of the monster’s limbs to knock another one loose. It would require an absurd degree of concentration.
And so, he triggered his Song of the Vigilant. At the same time, he activated his discharge. He attacked the monster both magically and physically. His Momentum Core made up for where his strength failed, and his wounds fed his Biomancy, making his wyrm seem like a mana bomb as the Woundeater detonated against the Jealousy’s Magical Resistance.
His magical attack momentarily stunned the Jealousy, offering him a few seconds of uncontested resistance. He slammed hard into the limb, shooting past the hydrokinetic surge. The jet of water crashed against the wall behind him, curving and splitting down at all angles from how fast it was going. The metal began to deform, but the interior of the teleportation anchor held—unlike many of the slaves below, shredded into pieces by the speeding streams of water.
Frustration exploded through Shiv, but he couldn’t think about them right now. He had to keep attacking and force the monster on the defensive to win.
The carapace of the tentacle he was pushing against first cracked, then broke, and finally, he sank into its flesh. But as he sank, he could already feel it healing around him again, fusing over his body, clenching him in place—and soon the Jealousy was pushing back. His Momentum Core was still driving him forward, but with a creature this big, and his mass and force concentrated in such a small area, he couldn’t wrestle it. He was like an arrow or a dagger passing through its body. He needed to be the opposite. He needed to be something like a massive telekinetic hand that could seize the beast by its enormous tentacles.
Shiv dug his fingers deeper into the creature’s flesh as he strained, armored skeletal digits slicing and ripping, but never granting him the purchase he needed, never giving him the overwhelming force he desired. Then, his Momentum Core began to die, and Shiv pushed with his Biomancy. But it wouldn’t be enough. He knew that. He pushed anyway, because he would die and break entirely before he surrendered.
Even if he wasn’t enough. Especially because he wasn’t enough.
But then, at that moment, he sensed something with his Biomancy field—another limb intersecting the one he was pushing. They were on a collision trajectory, and the other limb was currently gripping a focus crystal. His momentum died, but it was enough. The arm he was stuck in crashed into the other and caused it to rip free from the handle, tearing the focus crystal out from where it was bolted to the wall. After that, the limbs tangled. The Jealousy slipped—Shiv felt his guts plunge, and just as it did, just as the focus crystal grip broke free, something detonated inside Shiv as well.
It was like twin suns going into supernova inside him. Two skills shattered and reforged in the same instant, merging together as Shiv achieved something few humans ever would: successfully inventing a weird magical wrestling technique to sweep the limbs of a Heroic-Tier monster octopus well over ten thousand times his natural weight.
The Challenger is watching excitedly!
Skill Evolution: Might of Mass (Adept) > Gravitic Dominion (Master)
Skill Evolution: Grappling Proficiency (Initiate) > Takedown Artist (Adept)
Skill Fusion: Gravitic Dominion (Master) – Takedown Artist (Adept) > Gravitic Wrestler (Master)
Gravitic Wrestler > 102