Among the Necrotechs, there is the tradition of the Prime Disciple. When one ascends to Master-Tier, they become a Pathbearer charged with a set of responsibilities to the very nation that allowed them to climb to such heights.
At the hands of Valor Thann, a formal tradition was born: Masters would take on students, guiding them and instructing them along their Paths—correcting mistakes in their thinking and perfecting their skills. Yet, despite being the progenitor of this custom, Valor Thann’s personal Prime Disciples remain few and far between.
By all accounts, Valor Thann is a master who seeks only the truly worthy. He does not simply lay eyes upon a candidate and bestow favor. Instead, Valor Thann waits. Valor Thann observes. Only after a student has demonstrated true merit—in intent, integrity, and resolve—does he deign to approach.
And even then, they are not embraced immediately, for Valor Thann demands one final thing of all his students. A simple request unreasonable for most.
His Prime Disciple must descend into death… and return unchanged. For his methods of learning demands that one survive expeditions into oblivion, over and over and over…
-He Who Halts Eternity: Valor Thann
31 (I)
Disciples
Shiv drew in a breath and then peeked out from behind the giant mushroom. A lightning arrow instantly crashed into his skull-helmet, damaging the armor. Then the rest of the arrows struck his cover as well, each imbued with a different spell, detonating the base of the mushroom in a colorful sphere of destruction.
The Deathless drew whatever he could into his Momentum Core as his speed accelerated. His exoskeleton shuddered as microfractures lined its exterior, but he fused the broken parts back together with his Biomancy. He charged through the explosion, forcing his way through the shockwave with Might of Mass and crashing through spikes of jagged ice. He could endure the physical attacks. They still hurt if he let Adam bombard him enough, but Shiv didn’t consider pain to be the problem at hand.
The largest issue and most pressing was finding the Young Lord in the first place. This part of the wilderness was dense with vegetation and mega-fungi. To make matters worse, there were lifeforms everywhere, and even feral weavers that joined at random moments. Shiv’s Biomancy warned him of those lesser threats—and allowed him to dispatch with them with a quick heart-stopping spell—but its field didn’t expand far enough to detect Adam. It probably couldn't sense Adam even if Shiv was a Master of Biomancy right now, and Masters had fields that could span kilometers.
Not with Adam being capable of firing his new bow from leagues and leagues beyond.
The only warning Shiv got before the next wave of attacks fell was a shiver in the air and a flash of light through the foliage. Filling his core with momentum drained during his sprint, Shiv felt time slow to a near crawl just as a mind magic-infused arrow halted an inch away from his skull. How the Young Lord knew exactly where he was and proved so impossibly accurate with every shot was a mystery to Shiv—but it did make this entire exercise a real thrill.
Whatever issues he had with Shiv notwithstanding, Adam Arrow was a hell of a hunter. He was fast up close, inhumanly accurate from afar, and always moving—always repositioning. Adam’s Awareness proved to be a monstrous boon in the wilderness, offering him borderline foresight about what was coming and where he was going. Shiv could barely be considered near-sighted by comparison.
But despite all of Adam’s training and versatility, Shiv had a few extreme edges of his own. A big one was Momentum Core.
Shiv discharged the skill and exploded upward in a devastating detonation of velocity. With enough concentrated fire, Adam could blow through some vegetation, toppling the mega-fungi in half by compromising their base. But where Adam’s efforts left pockmarks of damage across the land, Shiv painted his progress across the land in swaths. All around him, the vegetation combusted, the ground tore, sound cracked, and the world trembled.
This time, he used his core to launch himself higher, flaying the canopy above him clean of greenery and mushroom caps. His Reflexes were dropping back down to baseline, but as he sailed through the air with bone drill in hand and skeletal armor ablaze with friction-flame, he activated his Song of the Vigilant briefly while airborne.
It was a risk, exposing himself this way. He learned that earlier when he tried to sprint through a clearing. But his Resonant Perimeter was one of his few means of locating the Young Lord reliably—and even then, it couldn’t stop Adam from simply flying off somewhere else. Momentum Core allowed Shiv to cover a massive amount of distance in an instant, but Adam wasn’t an idiot and knew better than to just move in straight lines.
I might need to deforest this entire place before he runs out of elevated perches to hide. And even then, he’ll probably just move somewhere else…There you are, bastard. The perimeter coated the wilds, highlighting hundreds of meters of crisscrossing fissures lining the land. Pulped mushrooms and collapsed trees littered the forest, but there, atop a lone mushroom cap, stood a humanoid figure outlined in vibrating webs.
The boost to his speed brought by Momentum Core was about to run out—and Adam was probably going to respond at any time. So Shiv distracted him. With the song sustaining his focus, Shiv quickly shaped a spell as he grasped his bone drill using his field and launched it as hard as he could over the distance. It sailed off with a crackle—but Shiv shattered it before it left his field, sending it out as jagged pieces of shrapnel. He didn’t have anything close to Adam’s accuracy, but quantity eventually became a sort of precision all on its own.
Sparks flashed across the Young Lord's armor, and Shiv watched him get flung off his feet. Grinning in delight, Shiv opened his armor and increased his Might of Mass—plunging down. As his decoy exoskeleton sailed toward Adam, Shiv used his Biomancy to reach into his cloak and pulled out three of the many reserve corpses he accumulated over the past few days, cackling to himself. I have you now, Young Lord.
He had gotten good at shaving the flesh off his corpses and extracting the bones using Biomancy. Thanks to his reading of the Odes, he knew which ligaments and tissues to unlatch before rupturing the skin along the spine. This time, he also made sure to dump all the organs and meat back inside his cloak. From there, he had three more skin decoys he could use momentarily, an actively-forming set of heavy skeletal armor that would keep him protected, and eight smaller bone drills pulled along by his field. The last thing Shiv saw of his old armor was a chain of arrows splashing against it before he fell through foliage again.
As he descended, he locked his new armor around himself and began draining momentum again. He heard a series of new blasts sounding from above. That was good. The plan was working. Adam hadn’t moved yet—it took him time to stabilize himself before he could unleash stronger shots. Shiv wrapped the skin from his flayed corpses around himself and struggled to keep his laughter under control.
The first night at camp, after amassing around ten corpses to build up his skeletal armor stores and to serve as “experimental biomass,” Shiv decided to have some fun. He took the skin off of one of his old bodies and made a mask of it before asking Adam if there was something wrong with his face.
The Young Lord’s cry of absolute terror was hilarious. So was the whole mess when Shiv threw the face away and feigned ignorance as Valor and Uva came to investigate.
Let’s see how loud I can make him scream this time. Shiv’s smile beneath his helmet could only be described as feral. But he needed to hurry. The Song of Vigilance was already beginning to strain his soul, and soon he would lose track of where Adam was. If he let the Young Lord slip now, he wouldn’t know how to begin tracking him down next time.
Shiv smashed through plant matter, nightglass crystals, and fungi as he tore forward. Slamming into something with Might of Mass did wonders to flood his Momentum Core, so he did it to as many things as he could. By now, Shiv sensed the Young Lord moving—saw his vibrating outline call upon his fiery wings to take flight.
But now Shiv was too close. And it was too late. Tearing out from the inside of another giant mushroom, Shiv felt the world grind to a lurching halt as he triggered another discharge. His bones rattled. His tendons jerked as a colossal force crashed against him. With the aid of Biomancy, Might of Mass, Diamond Shell, and his heavy exoskeleton, Shiv endured the cost of using his first Master-Tier Skill again.
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He shredded through trees and fungi at an angle, tearing through them like a blade passing through butter. The horizon zoomed toward Shiv, and along that horizon, the Deathless found himself on a path to intercept the Young Lord. He was off by a good few meters—but that’s where the skin decoys were so useful. Shiv could wrap them around objects and use them as distractions—but with his skin also infused with Diamond Shell and wieldable via Biomancy, they served as a pretty good lasso too.
Adam might be versatile. Adam might be well-trained. Adam might be tactically minded. But Shiv learned his own way in the ruins of Lost Angeles.
He learned to be resourceful with what little he had, and he learned how to prepare.
Adam barely managed to turn when a skin noose hooked around his waist. Shiv felt Adam’s face contort as the Young Lord discovered three of Shiv’s “faces” flapping against his armor. Adam barely had a chance to scream before he was pulled along by Shiv, the Deathless’s Momentum Core still discharging.
Intimidation > 10
To Adam’s extreme credit, he adapted quickly. He tried getting a shot off with Spellstring—what he named his new bow. That failed, as one of Shiv’s trailing bone drills smashed into his shoulder and sent the shot off course. But Adam never limited himself to just one bow up close. He sported more arms and shaped bows from water. He fired two streams of arrows. The first clashed against Shiv’s back, the other began to chip at the skin decoys.
Shiv smashed his remaining bone drills against Adam, breaking the Young Lord’s focus just as he started shaping a teleportation arrow spell—Shiv learned how annoying those were the first time he almost got close. Without an anchor, even a novice Jump Mage was a nightmare.
Then they were in the trees again. Shiv blasted through bark and plantmatter as he yanked on his skin rope and pulled Adam closer. The Young Lord slashed at him using blades made from surging water. They flowed so fast that they took entire chunks out from Shiv’s exoskeleton.
They probably would have cut through the Deathless’s initial armor, but Shiv learned to make his current sets much denser and thicker, exploiting his Diamond Shell to maximum effect.
With a final flex of focus before the Song of Vigilance became too painful to bear, Shiv wrapped his skin decoys around Adam’s helmet—fusing his flayed faces around the opening of Adam’s helmet. The Young Lord’s snarled with more outrage than terror this time—the startlement wearing off.
Then, Adam surprised Shiv for a turn: He managed a Portomancy spell mid-fall just as Shiv seized him by the neck. Suddenly, the Deathless felt a pocket of pressure expand around his fingers as a spatial bubble collapsed around Adam. For a beat, Shiv lost track of his adversary, but Adam cast the spell while blind and desperate, so he ended up appearing and smashing head-first into a large, glowing plant of some kind. The Young Lord’s body spasmed as he bounced off the plant. Shiv plunged halfway through the same plant, ripping through its innards and being covered in glowy, foul-smelling nectar before he rushed back out.
And almost caught a teleportation arrow to the jaw. Shiv’s empty Momentum Core flared. He shifted—and drained just enough of the arrow's speed that he managed to duck out of the way of the teleportation arrows. But not all the others that followed. A flood of bright arrows exploded against him, cracking the outer layer of his armor—fracturing even deeper as Adam started launching heavy shots from his Spellstring as well.
Shiv crashed against the wave of attacks. Mass of Might helped him push forward. Momentum Core siphoned away the energy from the oncoming arrows. Biomancy boosted Shiv's strength while also allowing him to yank at the dense bundle of skin clutching Adam’s face.
The Young Lord was ripped off his feet with a cry of dismay. Shiv laughed—then crashed face-first into the ground as he slipped on a patch of ice. Godsdammit Adam, why do you have so many different skills!
As Shiv launched himself over the frozen ground, he reached into his cloak again and projected a jetstream of blood and temporarily-stored tissue at Adam. The Young Lord—with the aid of a dozen Hydromancy-forged hands—managed to peel off the skin noose, only for a stream of crimson to crash into his face. Adam coughed, gagged, and then manifested his wings—only to crash into a nearby tree, cursing violently as he tumbled off. Despite this, he still managed to teleport. Right into another tree.
The sequence of events made Shiv almost double over laughing. Adam, meanwhile, wiped away all the blood and viscera covering his face and armor, his eyes wide with rage. “Enough! Stop! Stop!” Shiv came to a halt before the Young Lord practically choking, pointing at the other man’s expression. Disgust, horror, misery, and violent anger simmered on Adam’s face. “You think this is funny? You—you cover another man in your… your gore and blood, and you use your own flayed skin to bind him, and you think it’s funny?”
“Your... screams sure are,” Shiv said, gasping for breath.
“You are a sick man, Shiv. Sick! Broken Moon! I thought—I thought we were supposed to be training? That—that I was—”
“That you were going to put me in my place?” Shiv finished, staring at Adam.
“I did put you in your place. Several times.”
“When? Tell me when? Because it seems like I have you at my mercy.”
“Yes. Finally. After four bloody hours of wandering blind through the wilderness, getting hit by my arrows over and over, getting hit time and time again.”
Shiv waved him off. “Yeah. And I get hit by raindrops a lot too. Which was what your arrows were to me: raindrops.”
“Did you notice me not using the truly heavy spells I have? Did you not notice how I avoided striking you with massive bolts of lightning? Or—or mind-piercer arrows?”
“Oh, so you were just shooting at me for fun, then? Is having soft hands and no muscle a class at the academy?”
“No, but usually, we don’t deal with a demented maniac who throws his own blood and flesh at people and whose highest level skill is Toughness of all things. Hunting you is like trying to kill a Titan Boar. Except you're much smaller, are capable of some crippled, non-healing variant of Biomancy, and you’re capable of competent planning. Damn you!”
Shiv wanted to continue the banter, but he paused. “Wait, did you just compliment me?”
“No! It’s an obvious observation. I loathe-loathe-loathe you, but the fact of the matter is that you’re not an idiot. And pretending you are isn’t going to help me.” Adam used his Hydromancy to blast all the blood and biomass off his armor as he scowled. Shiv felt him, pulling away the bits of mass stuck in crevices and gaps. “I hate the fact that you can plan! I hate your plans! I hate the very way you plan! And I hate your damned cape!”
“You could have asked me for the rapier,” Shiv said.
“Yes! I should have! Damn your smug, goading nature and damn my pride too!” As the last of Adam’s frustration left him, he folded his arms and sulked. But it was halfhearted. “Launching a set of armor at me. The thing you did back there. It was a good idea. I have a hard time telling if you’re inside the armor or not when you’re airborne.”
“Because my footsteps?”
“Yes. That, and I need to react. React before you can get close enough to use your Biomancy. Frankly, I shamed myself by letting you get close. If this wasn’t practice…” Adam shook his head. “It won’t happen again. Mainly because I would rather die than let you wrap... This! This!” He pointed at Shiv’s discarded skin decoys. Decoys Shiv untied and moved back into his cloak, drawing a disgusted sound from Adam. “That is disgusting.”
“It’s funny,” Shiv said. “I got you to waste some shots on them earlier. And they make good ropes, actually.”
“Only someone truly sick of the heart would enjoy using something like that.”
“I don’t really enjoy using it, but it does make my Intimidation go up. You just screamed and I thought that was—”
“Yes! Fine! It scares me! I don’t like dealing with your flayed bodies! I don’t like all the blood and gore! Are you happy?”
“I… I guess?” Shiv grunted. He stared at the fuming Adam and shrugged. “I had to come up with something. I couldn’t get close to you at all—could barely guess where you were at first. I tried using Stealth but…”
Adam shook his head, water droplets flying from his crimson hair. “If it was a skill you used before, it has not kept pace with your others.”
“No,” Shiv said. “All I could do was avoid the worst of your hits while taking and drinking momentum from the rest. Your Awareness is too high, so I can’t really ambush you. You can fly pretty well, so I can’t chase you in the air for long, even if I fling myself around using Biomancy. And that’s not getting your Portomancy and all the other magical skills you have at the same time. Why the hells do you have so many skills?”
“Because every situation calls for a different solution,” Adam said. “That, and I started my training early. Earlier than most.”
“Yeah. It shows. Momentum Core was the only way I could close with you. Everything else wasn’t working.”
“Every time you use that damned, monstrous skill, I fight the urge to spit blood,” Adam muttered, his expression distant. “I curse the owl for letting you achieve such an evolution. Every time you discharge, it's like a small Dynamancy Bomb going off. I can’t even fly against the shockwaves. You flung me off my vantage point more than once.”
“I was just trying to cut down enough of the trees to find you. But you just kept moving.”
“I had to. It doesn’t matter that your weapon skills are lacking to nonexistent or that you make questionable tactical choices all the time. I said before, you’re built like a Titan Boar. More enduring, in fact, since you keep repairing your armor with those corpses you have stored.” Adam shivered with disgust. “All your deaths have shaped you into a nigh-unstoppable juggernaut for your skill threshold. At least physically. System, it sickens me more to imagine what might happen to your Toughness soon…”
“Oh, so I’ve graduated from being a meat-shield?” Shiv asked with a laugh.
“Yes,” Adam said through clenched teeth. “Do you want more praise?”
“Do you have more?”
The Young Lord let out a disgusted snort and walked away.
“Where are you going?” Shiv called.
“To clear my mind of you! And of the sensations of your skin latching around my face!”