89 (II) Companions [III]

89 (II)

Companions [III]

It struck as a splash of Necromancy bit deep into its eye and withered the glowing oculus. Black substance erupted out from the entity in a hissing spray as it stumbled. Its body, mostly a mass of colossal moving fingers, twitched across the ground as it shrieked in abject misery. The song of its shrieks tore at Shiv’s mind, and he emerged from his Vitae clutching his skull.

But he was still trailing a flood of void-black miasma wherever he went. Though the darkness that spread across the base of Gate Theborn started to thin and fade, the space above was consumed by a veil of unknowable black.

“HURTS? HURTS! HURTSSS!” the entity raged. The other versions of it sported similar wounds on their eyes as well. And that’s when Shiv realized they all still shared a soul. More Necromancy arrows tore across dimensions. The entity barely avoided getting hit again by shifting one of its pasts selves over to take the hit. Shiv corrected his assumption. The past self that was hit burst apart into dissolving Chronomancy. The present entity flickered back into place thereafter.

And then there were twenty-five. Twenty-five time-displaced eldritch entities left.

Huh, Shiv thought. He began crashing his fists together as he built up momentum. He shot past districts of Gate Theborn and bit back a groan of displeasure. Most of the gate was utterly destroyed. Much had been torn down during Shiv’s battle against the entity. Only a scant few bridges and a few dangling platforms remained, but the buildings they carried were mostly rubble anyway. But in the distance, near the surface gate, he saw massive crowds of people huddled around the few remaining buildings in this place—thousands of people all packed together.

That looks like a sizable chunk of survivors. At least some people got away. Godsdammit. Every time I fight here, someone dies. And now, he was starting to suspect that it was the System’s will to reap mass death and carnage. Is this enough felling strife for you?

Shiv speared high into the air. Below, the entities struck blindly, channeling their gazes through the Creeping Void he left in his wake. Soon, the middle of Gate Theborn, where the districts and people once lived, was drenched in a shroud of nothingness. But Shiv never stopped expelling more darkness. Without it, he would have likely been dead again. With it, his temporal shell fully regenerated, and Shiv had a moment to start preparing.

He reached into his cloak and started assembling a new set of armor around himself. He also recreated something from his broken memories. “Cancer flail,” Shiv grunted to himself. “I need… I need a cancer flail.”

As he did this, he tried to find Adam—but the Young Lord was nowhere to be seen—Shiv spotted a few dozen mana strands undulating blindly within his shadows. “U-Uva,” he muttered. “Right… She’s… a Psychomancer. I think.” He pulled himself toward the mana strands just as one of the entities blasted up into the air, barely missing him.

“WHERE? SHOW SELF! SHOW! SELF!” It sounded more frustrated than ever before.

Shiv just let it pass. He hated the damn thing. He hated eldritch bullshit. He hated all of this. But he needed a plan of attack. It was too big, too fast, too strong, and its Chronomancy was stronger than his as well. Pair that with how its nightmarish voice slashed at his very mind, and Shiv was done throwing himself at this thing in futility. He required a plan—an idea on how to kill it for good. But his mind was still all kinds of injured.

Thankfully, he wasn’t the only one here in this fight.

He had companions.

***

Bowslinger 98 > 99

Tactical Overseer 81 > 82

Mark of the Seeking Clairvoyant 103 > 105

Necromancy 2 > 3

Adam kept firing. He kept firing at every violet imprint on the world. He kept firing at all the things his Mark of the Seeking Clairvoyant highlighted when he first infused his Divination mana into the Recollector. Just receiving the details about its existence slashed at his mind. He kept getting flashes from its perspective—a perspective split across twenty-five instances of its personal chronology as it just kept…

Kept…

It kept bloody blinking out from his awareness. It was in one place and then another. There was no rhyme or reason to where it was going or where it was going to appear next. And there were still twenty-five of the felling things. He couldn’t tell which one was the original, or if there even was an original, or if they were about to skip across time or whatever other nonsense it kept pulling. And the more he focused on it, the more he tried to pull apart the details his Divination was feeding him, the more his mind broke, and the more Uva had to put him back together.

By this point, Adam was shooting Necromancy-infused lightning arrows at every single entity—wherever they appeared. His perfect awareness of the entities’ perspectives and locations allowed him to guess where it was about to arrive in a strange way. It wasn’t like precognition—though a lot of Diviners sold themselves as prophets. No, it was like being able to read casual patterns. Except that Adam was only semi-literate due to never truly practicing the art and only experiencing theory at the academy.

So. He solved that with quantity. More arrows. Arrows always. So many arrows that he was straining his Dimensionality mana for the first time.

The surrounding space around Adam shuddered brightly with a violet imprint. An entity was actively searching for him, rising high through the air while still being lost in that… unnerving, impenetrable darkness that kept growing across Gate Theborn.

“Shitshitshit!” the Young Lord cried. He fired an arrow in a random direction and then flew across the rift desperately. The shuddering and sudden perspective shift superimposing itself over his mind was usually the skill’s way of hinting to Adam that he needed to run. He emerged ten kilometers away, and he saw the space which he occupied come ablaze. A massive shockwave spread across that section of the gate. A swell of plasma dissipated thereafter, but Adam could feel the heat even so far away.

As the ionized air dissipated, he saw a violet imprint of an entity that continued screaming its hate for Shiv, for Adam, and its need to keep Uva as a vessel. The Young Lord sighed. “Have you found him yet?”

Uva’s threads were spread across the district. She lost track of Shiv the moment he and the entities began their confusing time-brawl. After that, both he and Uva only caught a flicker of Shiv as he accelerated past the entity, missing it entirely for some reason before plunging into the demolished base of Gate Theborn. Adam considered tracking Shiv, but that required him to shift his Divination mana out of the Recollector, and he wasn’t going to do that. Not a chance in all the hells.

“Uva?” Adam said. More perspectives splashed over his. The entities were groping blindly through the darkness. Where did that bloody darkness even come from? He couldn’t see through it with his Seer of Horizons, and the sounds within were distorted as well. But he could still hear. But that was ruined by the entities singing their damned mind-rending songs, and so—

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The space around them shuddered. Adam fired another arrow above the mana core. Time to reposition again. He hissed as an overflow of information tore something in his mind. The entities’ perspectives briefly overlapped with his—the entities were all frustrated. They wanted to break and destroy everything. But they couldn’t. They had lost a few of their past selves. And now the entity needed to drain some time from the survivors of the gate because it was dissolving before the rules of this dimension.

“Past or present is like space to it,” the Dreamtaker whispered to Adam. “You can take a step back or forward. And so time here hates it. It burns within our existence. Without a vessel for it to endure, it is constantly being flayed by the passage of the present against its wishes.”

Adam groaned as he clutched his head. His Divination was trying to show him even more, but it was too much. Even with Uva’s help keeping his sanity tethered together, it was too much. Too much for him to process. Too much for him to understand. Too much—

“I think I found him,”

A moment later, Shiv’s mind rejoined theirs. But ominously, the swelling darkness drew closer as well. Then, Uva drew some of Shiv’s near-term memories, and Adam realized the source of the darkness had been the Deathless all along.

“Master-Tier Stealth,” Adam commented to himself. He couldn’t help but laugh. Of course, the bastard got another evolution from this. “Godsdamned, but I’m relieved it was just your Skill Evolution for once, Shiv. I thought the damned Recollector was doing something to bring it about.”

Shiv’s thoughts came slowly and painfully. “I… I think… I don’t… Do you have a plan? It’s hard to think about certain things. Hard to focus for long. But we need to kill this thing. We must kill this thing.”

A heavy surge of anger came at the end of Shiv’s thoughts, and Adam flinched as he tried not to remember Shiv’s screams earlier.

“Right. A plan. Well. I managed to corrode the tower I had you drop earlier on the third gateway. I managed to plant the Graven Cage inside the severed elevator shaft. If we can get the Recollector across—”

“It’s too felling big,” Shiv grunted. He burst out from the top of the Creeping Void and flung himself at Adam. He was armored again, with a bone adamantine kukri in one hand and a cord—oh, good, of all the things this brain-damned bastard remembered, it was the cancer flail.

Shiv pulled back with his field as he came to a sudden halt beside Adam. “Too big,” Shiv gasped. “And there are too many. It’ll just move across time. It can…” He let out a groan as he lost his words. “It… The past is… It can go there. It exists there too. I can’t keep it pinned easily. And then… your Necromancy was the only thing that hurt it. It took out one of its eyes.”

Just then, the space around them shuddered violet again, and Adam bit back a hissed breath as his mind struggled to process what he was seeing. “People…” The entities were going up. They were screaming about— “They’re coming for the people. The survivors. They’re running out of their own time. They need to bind themselves to new vessels.”

“Desperate.” The Dreamtaker laughed. “Most do not have the soul-size-power-shape-integrity to bear the Recollector. They will break. It will only get a few more past selves from them.”

“A few more!” Adam cried. “We can’t deal with it now. What the hells are we supposed to do against more?” He fired a Veilpiercer that placed them directly over the surface gateway. Adam growled. His Dimensionality was starting to strain. He didn’t have many Veilpiercers left in him.

“It needs the Seeker. Or the unbreaking one. Won’t stop until it gets them. Otherwise, it dissolves for good. Gone-dust-time-flayed.” The Dreamtaker chuckled.

Adam just grimaced. He felt through the dimensional pathway, and Shiv followed.

“Adam,” Shiv said. “I… I can face it. I can confuse it with my darkness. Make it get lost. I can fight it across time with my Chronomancy. But I can’t protect the people from it. I can only die stalling it. Until it burns away. Or it breaks all of us.”

The Young Lord’s heartbeat quickened. How were they going to beat this damned thing? Even if he had infinite Dimensionality mana, or a method to… to…

And then he looked at Shiv. And he remembered how Shiv managed to ward off the Educator—and the forgotten Ascendant she was tied to.

“No!” Uva snarled. “No. Do you hear me? No. That is not acceptable. We will NOT do that.”

“Do what?” Shiv muttered. He stared at Adam’s arrow for a moment, and slowly, through the broken ruins of his memories, he grunted. “Oh… That. But the blast might kill everyone here. I’ll do it, but—”

“No,” Adam said, speaking to both Uva and Shiv. “I don’t want to use you. I’m still going to use the core. The entity exists across time, but it always has a version of itself in the present, right? So… so, I bring the cage back over. And then I open the surface gateway while the people cross. Then, we distract the entity. We keep it here and conduct a gradual fighting retreat to the gateway. Before we leave, I’ll fire an arrow and destabilize this cage. It should set the Animancy Core inside off. But we need to be gone when that happens.”

“We’re destroying Gate Theborn?” Uva rasped.

“Yes,” Adam growled. “And then we’re fleeing.”

“Over to the surface? Where the Light-Curse will kill most of the people here? Or me, if I don’t remain hidden deep in your mind at all times?”

“What other choice do we have?” Adam cried. The air around Adam shuddered with violet mana. They needed to move again. “Godsddammit. We can…” Adam looked at the Abyssal Gateway. It was so far away, and there was nothing connecting it to the Surface Gateway anymore either. And there were still over twelve thousand people left alive in Gate Theborn. Twelve thousand crowding around the Surface Gateway. He just didn’t—

Adam paused. His head snapped to the mana core.

Shiv snarled. “They’re coming. I can see them. They’re going for the people. I’ll buy you some more time. I'll be back if—when I… I will find a way back…”

“No, listen,” Adam said. “We’re going back to the original idea. It’s good that the entity is going for the people. It will get close to the Surface Gateway.”

Shiv paused. Uva was confused too.

“The Jealousy,” Adam breathed. “The Jealousy could be teleported into Gate Theborn through a gateway! And the gateways are connected! By the mana core. I don’t have the mana to move the Recollector. I barely have enough Dimensionality left for another ten Veilpiercers. But the mana core does. Shiv. Go. Spread your Creeping Void over the people. Keep them alive if you can. Uva! I need—”

Her strands were already shooting down toward the survivors. “I know. But you should be there in person before them. It will make your Gate Lord Synchronization faster if they can see you and hear you.”

“Right. Shiv. Distraction first. Then, we need to somehow ensure the Recollector’s present-period body touches the gateway. So I can teleport it across to the Vulketh Gateway, and then we need to… to stun it somehow, so it doesn’t just slip back across time. Or use one of its past-selves to avoid harm.”

“Then, after he finishes distracting the Recollector initially, he should cross over to the Vulketh Gateway first.” Uva concentrated. “His shadows… They were enough to confuse the entities. They’re lost inside his darkness.”

Hope exploded inside Adam. “And we can use it to hide the cage.”

Shiv grunted. “Good. We have… We have a plan… I’ll go and…”

His words died on his lips as Adam embraced him. Shiv blinked. Adam pulled away after less than a second.

“What… Why?” Shiv asked, confused.

Adam smirked sorrowfully. “Because you’re my bloody hero, you big, broken bastard. I’m just sorry you broke yourself for me.”

Slowly, Shiv laughed. “I… will do it again… in a heartbeat.”

And then, something shook beneath them as the Recollector’s many selves began to shriek. Shiv spiked his field down and vanished from Adam’s sight. No more words. No more time. Just a desperate plan, and little else unsaid.

“You too, Hero Uva,” Adam murmured as he aimed a Veilpiercer at where all the people were. Darkness exploded out from Shiv, and they screamed as it fell over them. Adam loosed his shot before the people were swallowed by Shiv’s Creeping Void. “Thanks for keeping me together.”

“The honor is all mine, Hero Adam. Now. Let’s go kill something far beyond our power.”