90 (IV)
Prevail
And then a berserker rage overtook Shiv. His Inertial Overdrive spiked to new heights, as did his Adamantine Adaption, and his Gravitic Wrestler. He spiked his field constantly, blasting across entire kilometers, even while time remained frozen. More of his temporal armor shattered away. He had five seconds. Five seconds was an eternity for him. A flood of Woundeaters tore out across the world, snaking out, crashing into one entity after another.
They burst apart and died before they could react. One of them managed to fire a beam. Shiv went low and smashed into the entity. He gripped it. The Recollector cried out. Its body deformed and twisted inward, moving in dimensions Shiv couldn't fully grasp. But then he sank his Biomancy into it, and he drew its flesh outward, forced it to be three-dimensional, and then he flayed it apart using his Woundeaters.
"I'm still coming,” Shiv roared. “Stand and fight!”
But they didn't turn and fight him. In fact, of the dozen or so entities remaining, they all shuddered, shivered, and then they let out a collective wail. They burst apart into rivers of gold, and they accelerated across time, across space, splashing into the original. Shiv rose through his Creeping Void. Over his shoulder was the mana core, and in the distance, the Recollector’s true self hovered just over the Abyssal Gateway.
Fifteen kilometers. I think. I got this. I just need to reorient my charge. Shiv came to a halt and burst his inertial sheath. And as he did, he discharged all the momentum, speed, and force he'd been storing in himself this entire time. A massive explosion consumed the center-most portion of Gate Theborn. Whatever bridges, platforms, or rubble that still remained in that section simply disintegrated.
At the end, Shiv's temporal armor broke away from him. Time resumed. He hovered in the air, shuddering, heaving with every breath. Blood poured down from his eyes, his ears, his nose. Blood oozed out from the very pores of his skin. And he growled; the voice that escaped him was closer to some kind of animal than a man. As the final throes of Shiv's Berserk died away, his cry of pain turned into a loud howl. His soul was aching. Using two Blessings at the same time was too much even for someone like him, even for a Heroic-Tier Pathbearer. He cut the Blessings off, but the pain consuming the left side of his body remained.
That pain overrode practically everything else. Shiv tried to fight it, but he couldn't. He doubled over briefly, biting back another loud scream.
"It’s nothing," he muttered to himself, lying. "Doesn’t hurt at all…" And he spent a moment recovering. He kept an eye on the entity. The Recollector began to twitch and change. Its flesh was pulsing and mutating. As was its Chronomancy.
"How many godsdamn transformations do you have?" Shiv groaned.
***
Adam fell from the air in a stunned state, but didn’t drop for long before Uva caught him.
She rose through the Creeping Void on her shield, and her body folded into the shape of a large bowl to accommodate how fast they were both moving. Without her Physicality Skill Evolution, they both would have sustained terrible injuries. Now, Adam was concussed but mostly fine. And slightly weirded out.
Uva’s head folded over her unnaturally curved body like a leaf peaking over the edge of a cave entrance. “Adam? Are you alright?”
He took a moment to recover. Another immense shockwave washed over them, but where the tsunami of crushing force swatted Adam out of the air just moments ago, it curved around the eldritch dimensions of Uva’s body, sparing them both.
“I… am,” Adam groaned. “I think. Thank the Ascendants for your creepy but greatly effective Physicality Evolution.”
“It’s rather growing on me too,” Uva said, her voice grim. She reshaped her body back to its original state and held Adam firm. Below, Adam saw multiple violet imprints gathering at the base of Gate Theborn. A few were turning away, making their way back up—but they halted in place briefly.
“I summoned more New-Dreamt,” Uva said with a weary breath. “But they will not hold the Recollector back for long.”
Adam winced as flickers of alien perspectives crossed over into his mind. The Recollector was lost in the dark. And scared. Something was smashing into it over and over again. No, someone.
He caught a flash of Shiv from their perspective. He resembled a mutilated madman in the flashing glimpses he caught of the Deathless. Both his hands were aglow with Biomancy spells, but he was also veiled in a set of fractured, golden armor.
Then, all at once, the Recollector’s past selves began dying
. They burst apart—one winking out of existence after another, all across the gate. They split asunder, were ripped and torn and boiled and scattered apart by Biomancy. For a moment, their pain was Adam’s pain as he gasped and choked. But the scenes winked out, and all the Divination imprints began to vanish. All except for one.In the far distance, the original Recollector rose out from the darkness near the Abyssal Gateway. A few kilometers away from it, the tiny silhouette of a man speared up from the darkness below, halting in place to face the eldritch being. Then, a massive explosion erupted from Shiv and unleashed a globe of destruction that spread out for a good eight kilometers before it finally ceased.
Uva and Adam both stared slack-jawed at the titanic showdown for a moment. And then a notification sent them both scurrying into action.
Gate Mana Synchronization Complete: Gate Lord Arrow has been recognized.
An incredible surge of pure mana flooded Adam, the effect greater than any rush of adrenaline. “Gateway! Down! Now!”
Uva descended. He shot out of her arms. More darkness spilled out from Shiv, spreading across the gate. But she didn’t need to see to gaze into the Outside. And Adam didn’t need to see to shape Dimensionality.
Overhead, the mana core of Gate Theborn came alive with a rumbling roar, and the first flakes of snow began to fall…
***
He spiked himself toward the entity, and the kinetic energy infusing his inertial sheath rumbled to life with a satisfied purr. He spiked himself seven more times in rapid succession. He fed his current injuries into a Woundeater and developed new ones. As he accelerated, he thought back to the memories that made him so enraged, trying to trigger his Berserk again.
"Come on," he thought to himself. He remembered the screams. He remembered what it did to his friends, what it did to the ones he treasured.
"Come on," Shiv growled, the first rush of hate entering his voice. A sight of Uva’s dismemberment hit him over and over. The memory of Adam screaming as the entity tried to tear his head off. Valor's broken form. Can Hu, unmoving. How it tortured him over and over and over, even as he screamed, even as his mind broke. An incoherent bellow escaped Shiv. He induced Berserk himself again. His Inertial Overdrive detonated with more kinetic energy than ever. A wake of cascading force and traveling fire followed him.
Fuck the plan, fuck any kind of strategy, fuck whatever they needed to do with the Animancy Core. He was gonna kill this thing dead. He was gonna break it with his bare felling hands and rip it open and drink its godsdamn eldritch entrails!
Shiv accelerated. Everything below him split apart. He kept going.
Yet, even as Shiv drew closer, the entity didn't move. The Recollector shuddered in place as its body trembled with building wavelengths of gold that suddenly blasted out. Chronomancy splashing over him, but it didn't displace Shiv. It didn't do anything other than extend outward. More than that, the waves were flaking apart. The entity’s Chronomancy was dissolving! For a moment, Shiv thought it was about to die, and deep in his rage-addled mind, he let out a laugh of glee.
But then all the eyes on its body swirled. They glided across its massive hand-like face and spiraled into the vortex at the center of its palm. And just then, the underside of the entity snapped upward. All its finger folded back. Bones jutted out, bones that hatched, a deluge of black ichor into the open air. If Shiv hadn’t been caught in the throes of Berserk, he might have stopped. He might have asked what it was doing. He wasn't rational at the moment. He kept spiking forward, faster, faster, faster. Both of his arms dislocated. His legs broke. He still went faster.
Adamantine Adaption 150 > 151
Then the vortex at the center of the entity's face-hand inverted outward. A massive eyeball surfaced, an amalgamation shaped from all other eyes. The grand oculus glittered with kaleidoscopic radiance as Shiv got within a hundred meters. Just then, the Chronomancy field around it solidified. It tried to halt time the normal way, holding everything within the expanse of its Chronomancy still, but Shiv smashed through its field. It was wide. He was dense. His Skill Evolution made him a temporal fortress unto himself. He was made to kill other Chronomancers.
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Parts of his armor broke. Its Chornomancy tore.
The entity reared back, it shrieked, and all its broken bones collapsed underneath its body, becoming as if columns of spider-like legs created from snapping joints of white. Its skin dangled behind it, spewing oily black substance into the world, and through it all, the entity began to burn. It began to burn in earnest, igniting in a golden blaze as Shiv felt the flame spread across its Chronomancy. Time itself came afire, and all things within reach of its mana felt an uncanny heat.
"Will not let you kill, murder, break, eat, consume, destroy me. Will not, will not," the entity whimpered. It channeled a beam from its enormous eye. The world vanished into a blinding spiral of colors. Shiv froze time himself and spiked upward. But to his surprise, the entity kept moving with him as its Chronomancy adapted to his pace immediately.
Its eye-beam tore across Gate Theborn. A chasm opened within the world and nearly swallowed Shiv. He launched himself back in time and just barely dodged it.
“HAHAHA! NO! NO! NO!” another voice shrieked. It sounded weirdly like Uva. “NO CALLING THE STRANGER! FINISH THIS! DIE HERE! DIE ALONE! DIE FOREVER!”
The entity wailed. Then it suddenly inverted across time. It blinked beside Shiv and slashed at him with one of its bones. He let out a wild roar of pain as it cut off his left leg, misjudging his position. Then the Creeping Void splashed over it, and it missed its next shot entirely.
He cast a Woundeater at it. But then it jolted out of existence. Somehow it went from being right next to him to a full kilometer off by his left. And then it jolted again, and it reappeared right underneath him and launched itself up. Shiv responded by casting himself back in time a full second and slamming into the entity.
As he crashed against it, Shiv imprinted it with one of his temporal echoes. But as he struck its body, its center mass curved inward and out of his way. He slipped through before he had the chance to do anything. Once more, the entity moved, and this time, Shiv noticed something: it moved as if riding the currents of its burning Chronomancy. It was sinking into its burning, fading magic, re-emerging at any other point within the expanse of its mana in an instant. Every time it did that, its field also shrank a little. How it could do that, if it was natural at all, and if he could replicate that, Shiv didn't know.
And he couldn't know right now. He couldn't focus. All he wanted was to rip the entity apart.
He cast himself back in time again. His armor was half destroyed. He charged at the entity. But this time, rather than firing a massive beam blindly due to Shiv’s Creeping Void, it swung out with every single one of its jutting, broken, jagged limbs. To his astonishment, it moved faster than he did. And one of the bladed joints clipped him along the back, unzipped him from neck to groin. He split in half—but he still didn’t die. Berserk kept him going even as his organs untangled from his body.
Shiv shrieked with agony as the entity shot away behind him, rushing for the Surface Gateway. “MUST GO! NEED TO GO NOW! NOW HAVE TO RUN! FLEE! NEED TIME! RUNNING OUT OF TIME-FLESH-BLOOD-LIFE! ENOUGH! NEED TIME!”
As the enemy fled, Shiv gaped at just how fast it moved. It tore across the world in a blurred instant. He guessed it was probably at least ten times faster and stronger than before. With how its flesh bulged and strained, all the other entities seemed to be stacked inside it, pooling their collective power.
Godsdamned—bullshit! Shiv thought through his berserker haze. He reacted. He cast himself at the entity. His armor shattered as he jumped across time to his imprinted anchor. He slammed into the entity once more.
His Inertial Overdrive was reverted to an earlier stage. His Berserk refilled. But even with all that, even with Berserk, even with Inertial Overdrive, and his gravitic field, it pushed him back.
Shiv let out a hoarse cry. He spiked his field ten more times against the entity. His body began to dissolve into bloody mist. He spiked three more times, and his organs burst out from his succumbing flesh. Blood sprayed out from his orifices. The entity spasmed in place. It slowed. Its massive eye glared at him. He struck it. His fist bounced off without doing any harm. He let out a cry of frustration, of exhaustion, of effort, of pain, of everything he had left. He spiked again and nearly crushed himself to paste.
And then the ringed creatures Uva summoned earlier crashed into it. Their bodies exploded against the entity, detonating in chasms of glowing brightness. Deep wounds lined the entity. Parts of its Chronomancy simply ceased to be. It let out a shriek and then blasted Shiv with a beam of color.
He heard himself scream. He saw glorious shapes and colors and things he was not meant to know. His mind teetered on the brink of madness. But then a counter-color slammed into the entity’s gaze. Uva rose up behind Shiv on her shield. She was howling with effort. More and more hues flooded out from her eyes, clashing against the entity as she cast her mana strand into its mind.
“NO! SEEKER! AWAY! AWAY! SEEKER! STOP!”
Uva reached deep, and she spasmed. Her eyes rolled as blood sprayed from her orifices. Shiv’s stomach plunged, but then the entity started seizing as well. “Gateway!” she choked out. “Get it to touch the Surface Gateway!” She tore at the entity’s very consciousness, but it seemed being inside it was near torture for her as well.
Shiv blinked. Through the forest of his rage, he barely understood her. But he knew what a gateway was. And he knew how he was going to get the entity there. Even with all his strength, rage, and more, it was much stronger and faster than him. Berserk had him. He couldn’t think of using a Biomancy spell, didn’t have the rationality to plan, so he acted on instinct. Shiv spiked to the right and parried the entity over him.
Frictionless Vector 59 > 61
Frictionless Vector triggered. It exploded across the world, and he clung onto it with his field. Uva dove into its mind. Together, he pounded its exterior while she tore at its ego. As his Inertial Overdrive was still going against the entity, he induced a constant drag behind it, allowing him to twist its movement direction. Uva kept it from jumping across time, from responding to him. Flashes of clashing color pulsed out from the insides of the entity’s mind as it screamed across the skies and came crashing down at the Surface Gateway at alarming speeds.
“NO!” the Recollector screamed. It projected a version of itself into the past, and Uva snapped free from its body as Chronomancy exploded around it. The entity tried blasting her with its gaze, but Shiv twisted it just enough that it missed, and the beam tore across the world in a maelstrom of destruction. But then the other entity curved through the air and came for him! There was no way he could—
A corrosive arrow plunged into the entity’s eye. Both it and its clone screamed. The clone tried to respond, but a beam of crushing frost slammed down and shattered it from on high. The mana core roared. The world grew horribly cold in a near-instant. The original entity writhed, and Shiv saw how perfectly aligned it was with the gate in the distance—but he was still accelerating in the wrong direction.
His rage broke. His anger was spent. Shiv popped his inertial sheath.
A second explosion tore through Gate Theborn. Uva’s shield folded around her as her body went flat. She was spiked into the ground. Shiv liquefied himself with the inertial discharge. But with his death came a wave of force like no other, and it launched the stunned Recollector across two kilometers of space in an instant.
It tore through the tops of buildings, eviscerating anything it came into contact with. Waves of force launched thousands of screaming people off their feet, and the entity clipped the top of the Surface Gateway. Just barely.
Just enough.
Shadowy mana spilled out from the gateway and wrapped around the entity. A layer of distortions consumed it, pulling it across space and time. In an instant, it blinked from the Surface Gateway and was teleported.
Not to the surface, but to Vulketh.
And a second after it was teleported, a second pulse of teleportation followed as well.
***
It took Adam more than a lot of effort, but he managed to figure out how to rearrange the dimensional routes between each of the gateways. As such, he conditioned the Surface Gateway not to connect to the surface at all. Rather, it would temporarily redirect an entity from the Surface Gateway to the third gateway as an exit. More than that, he conditioned the terms of this activation to be upon contact.
And as soon as he finished with that, his heart nearly leapt out of his throat. The damned creature was right there, moving fast and about to smash into him. Holding it back were, against all odds, Shiv and Uva, tearing into its mind and body.
Just looking at the thing scraped at Adam's sanity. Without Uva shielding his mind, he was feeling himself coming undone. Feeling his mind break apart. But with how the people were screaming, they weren't handling its presence even worse. But still, Adam Arrow was a Pathbearer. And before madness took him, he would die a Pathbearer. He sucked in a sharp lungful of air and nocked an arrow. His Dimensionality screamed as he strained his mana to the very brink after all the effort he spent on the gateway. He dipped his Veilpiercer in Necromancy.
He exhaled. And he fired.
He nearly blacked out then. But the arrow passed through space and struck the entity. It reeled back. Its cry roused him. Its cry filled him with willpower. And then Shiv fucking exploded. A massive, catastrophic impact blew out both of Adam's eardrums and knocked him off his feet. As he lay there, he saw the entity clip the gateway and vanish. He didn’t waste any time. He rolled over and touched the gateway himself.
And a second later, the molten waters of Vulketh crashed against Adam’s Magical Resistance while the entity writhed and burned.
Both of them burst out from shadowy shrouds of Dimensionality. Its mass was colossal, confused. And it displaced so much molten fluid. And Adam, though in immense mental pain, was exactly prepared for the present moment. He flared his wings, and to his satisfaction, they still worked underwater, well, under the molten ocean that comprised Vulketh's inner depths. There, he positioned himself right in front of the elevator shaft he had corroded earlier in preparation for this.
Within, the Graven Cage crackled with malicious color.
The Gate Lord shaped his last arrow, the last arrow he had the mana to prime. He prepared himself. The entity shifted and noticed him. And though Adam's sanity quavered an inch toward the brink, he spat in its direction and loosed his shot.
“NO!”
It moved toward him. It struck his armor. Adam was blasted back through the gateway.
The last thing he saw was the entity consumed by a flash of truly blinding light. The Gate Lord exploded out from Vulketh and was thrown back through the Surface Gateway.
As he tumbled and bounced across the ground, he coughed up blood and felt things inside him break. But he was alive. He was—
The entity reappeared in a flash of Dimensionality.
It howled as a hundred grasping limbs came for him.
Despair consumed Adam.
But that emotion quickly became confusion as the entity began to flicker in and out of existence.
“WHAt—doNW NO! FNAGHNT—SOUL-BREAK-BURN-DIEEE!”
And then, with a final blink, the entity seared a deep imprint onto reality and faded out of existence.
But still, he could hear it screaming. Still. Never-ending. It was like part of it had been meshed into the fabric of existence from the Animancy blast...
Adam vomited another mouthful of blood and just stared. Stared as he lay upon a mess of moaning bodies. Stared as the entity didn’t come back, didn’t jump across time.
“We—we did it,” he breathed. He laughed. He started sobbing. “We—oh, shit! Shiv! Uva!”