93 (I) Reinforce

A soul being damaged is a colloquial way of describing the pain one feels when their skills are shattered, or when they suffer the effects of Necromancy.

The soul itself, after all, is more of a repository—a storage or archive for our own legends and history. It is these legends and histories, these feats of struggle and triumph and defeats, that shape our skills. And what are skills but expressions of who we are, who we strive to be, who we will become, should we continue walking our Paths?

Necromancy, then, is reaching that which is lost. It reaches into defeat. It reaches into the shadow of who we are, the parts where we are insufficient, the moments we fell—all that was and was lost, all that could have been and was never reached. That is why Necromancy is so destructive to the so-called soul: because it is a story breaker, a story defiler, something that withers potential itself.

And that is why all entities drawn back from the brink of death, called Risen, are more Fallen in actual fact. They are Fallen because they are at their lowest potential. They are a shadow of who they were, who they could be, and they are the echoes of their darkest thoughts, their ruined memories, their destroyed history.

Fallen Legendary Pathbearers often plunge far beneath even Heroic-Tier after their destruction and pseudo-resurrection.

But then, I asked myself if one is capable of falling, if one can be broken so brutally, if a skill, a history, one's own conception of their personal mythology made manifest through the System's magic can be deformed so drastically, then it should also be possible to remake a soul. To remake the components of a soul, to shape history without ever truly performing a requisite deed in the eyes of the System.

And thus, we depart from Necromancy—the shadow of what was, the ease of breaking—and we enter Animancy, which, if I am correct in my assumptions, is the magic of magic itself.

More experimentation is required.

-Udraal Thann’s Animancy Notes

93 (I)

Reinforce

Before Shiv even spiked his gravitic field once, Adam surged right past him. There was no warning, no hint, or anything that could have prepared the Deathless for just how quickly the Gate Lord reached top speed. Shiv realized immediately that Adam had undergone a major Skill Evolution. Rather than having the fiery Wings of the Starhawk, he now had six inverted pyramids, white-hot and pulsing bright with strange energy.

The wings gave off no force at all. There were no ripples in the air, no shock waves; there wasn't even any sound. It was like Adam was traveling without propulsion. And after a few seconds more, Shiv was certain the Young Lord was

There was also no build-up to him reaching max velocity. One moment, Adam was still; the next, he was shooting ahead and accelerating at a constant, staggering pace. Shiv felt his jaw drop momentarily. This, he didn't see coming at all. And as Uva cast herself into his mind, she tasted his surprise as well.

But the surprise didn't last. A sudden, aberrant feeling of competitiveness overcame Shiv, and he spiked his field again and again, chasing after the new Gate Lord. Uva kept them all connected, but her Reflexes Skill was drastically inferior to both of theirs now. She barely managed a thought while both of them spoke to each other.

"That's a nice Skill Evolution to have there," Shiv said.

"I got it when the bloody Stranger tried to drag me into its mouth." Adam spat back a shudder.

Shiv's amusement died down. He realized just how much Adam was holding within himself. How much stress, how much terror, how much anguish. Fighting the eldritch entity took a lot out of Adam Arrow, and it was a miracle he was still keeping it together. Such was why Shiv resolved to take Adam's mind off things with a brief, albeit interesting, race.

For a bit, he considered using his Strider of the Unbending Path to instantly reappear right next to Adam and shock the Dimensional Archer. He guessed it was probably four kilometers of distance. Adam was turning into a smaller and smaller dot on the horizon, but between Inertial Overdrive and stopping time, Shiv dismissed that thought. He wasn't going to be cheap. He didn't have it in him to be cheap; Adam deserved better than that. Besides, Shiv wanted to see if he could actually catch up to Adam using his own Heroic-Tier Skill Evolution. There was a reason why he had Inertial Overdrive, after all.

So far, it seemed Adam's skill was outright superior, but if there was one thing Shiv learned through all his trials and triumphs, it was that there was always more than meets the eye for every skill one gained. There were always advantages, limitations, and prices to pay, and he intended to discover Adam's, along with his own.

Shiv spiked his field a dozen times in quick succession. His speed exploded. The world around him turned into a traveling ball of flame. The Young Lord briefly stopped. Shiv saw Adam turn around, shifting in place while his wings remained unmoving. The pointed ends of each of his vectors determined his position of acceleration. That was another advantage Adam had; he seemed to be able to move his body freely, independent of his wings, meaning he could be going in one direction and not even need to twist his body around entirely to shoot. The wings could reorient him, and he made instant and extreme turns and flight adjustments without suffering any drag either.

Truly, Adam was a frictionless flyer. Reactionless, Shiv thought again. But the difference in their Heroic-Tier skills quickly revealed itself. Where once Adam seemed impossibly fast, the growing gulf between them began to slow, stop, and then shrink. Slowly, Shiv was moving faster. Adam drew closer with every spike Shiv applied to himself. His gravitic field pulled him along, and every single surge of momentum he gained was retained all throughout his journey, and with the frequency of his gravity spikes, his speed soon grew to be exponential.

At first, he crawled closer to Adam, inching toward the Young Lord bit by bit. But with every subsequent pull on his field, his body groaned and suffered. Wounds opened up, his recently mended gash lining his chest bled freely, his soul burns coating the left side of his body screamed at him, but Shiv was too excited and too motivated to stop. His mind skipped briefly as he forgot why he was doing this, but the pain brought him back. His parts within his body were destroyed from the sheer force of Inertial Overdrive. His acceleration drastically outpaced Adam's. He shot forward like a plunging anvil, while Adam went from an arrow in flight to a feather held still by a rushing gale.

Despite this, Shiv realized that Adam was ridiculously fast. Absurdly, compared to most people. It was just that he seemed to have a maximum ceiling to his speed, one that might increase with future Skill Evolutions and levels gained. But the velocity at which he traveled couldn't stack, and that was where Shiv beat him. The Young Lord flew wide, rising high into the air to avoid the massive tsunami of force that followed Shiv in his wake. A surging fist of flame smashed over the ruins of Gate Theborn. Below, the rubble began to melt, and as the force of his dragging acceleration crashed over them, they dissolved to nothing but ash and motes of dust.

"What in the bloody hells was that?" Adam cried.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Shiv could only laugh—laugh as he coughed blood, as his eyes burst, as his vision began to fade. Uva was starting to mutter something inside his mind, doubtlessly calling for him to stop. Or to control his speed. But for a while, just a while, he wanted to go this fast. He wanted to see the difference between them. He couldn't help it.

He was born to fight. He was born to face down titans. And he was born to compete with Adam Arrow.

But as Shiv continued on, he realized another major advantage Adam had over him. Reactionless. The word repeated in Shiv's mind over and over as he realized Adam was easily capable of halting in place, going from traveling kilometers every second to becoming impossibly still, without any ill effect to his body.

Shiv, meanwhile, was practically being eroded down to his bone. He gritted his teeth and pointed downward, but even the attempt to wrestle the vector of his acceleration proved to be a grand struggle. He was going too fast, far too fast for his gravity field to even contend with, and frankly, his gravity field was the problem. Once he picked the direction that he was going in, the best he could do was make a few small angles of adjustment after extreme speed was achieved.

Inertial Overdrive was really defined by "overdrive." Eventually, he would get to a point where his strength wasn't enough, where his body was just fragile glass rather than adaptive adamantium.

Right, Shiv thought, that's enough of that. And then he froze time.

His temporal shell flared over him, and he projected his Chronomancy back a full ten seconds, practically halfway across the entire gate. He blinked in place, and his armor shuddered just a little. Shiv grinned once more. His Strider of the Unbending Path could arguably be the greater reward of his recent struggles, even as just a Master-Tier skill. Inertial Overdrive might have been Heroic, but some skills simply offered an absolute advantage instead of a relative one.

Suddenly Shiv was slower, his body wasn't so damaged, and he detonated his inertial sheath with a thought. The blast wave was still intense; the fireball cleaved out, and he flattened it into the form of an envelope. As he struck his hands together, creating a counter-shock wave against the displaced force rushing up behind him, it flattened and cleaved downward, spearing a full kilometer deep into the already ruined earth. A glistening lip of glass and melted obsidian shone from far below. For a moment, it seemed that one of Gate Theborn's molten rivers had returned, but ultimately, the gleam faded as the heat dissipated.

A second later, Shiv forgot what he just did again, why he gained a Gravitic Wrestler level.

Gravitic Wrestler 140 > 141

Finally, Uva responded, finishing her thought. "Shiv, what just… It felt like I lost an entire section of my time. Did you freeze time? Did you use your Chronomancy again?" She sounded annoyed, but also fascinated, and slightly excited.

"Yeah," Shiv said. His thoughts felt loose and hard to track. "I just had a little race with Adam."

Adam was still flinching, looking around, trying to find where the wall of force and flame coming right at him went. He stared at Shiv, and the Deathless laughed—laughed as the Young Lord hovered above, cursing at him. Shiv shook his head. He got a little carried away then, and then he noticed his own mind was still reeling. His own impulses were all over the place. His mood shot high, swooped low, and he groaned.

Shit… I’m still messed up… The brain damage inflicted on him was still lingering. He wasn't completely well, even after everything Uva did.

And to cement that understanding, she began to stitch away at him again. "Composer, I don't know how you're coherent right now," she breathed.

"I just… I…" And Shiv thought back to his torture, how the things clawed at his very skills, how the entities the Recollector poured into him tore his mind apart over and over again, deformed his body, mutated him as they tried to mold him into a desired vessel for their eldritch designs. He went insane several times then. He went insane, but eventually, he always came back…

Then, just then, a voice whispered from within, Rose's voice. Even I… Even I come back,

Shiv ignored her dehumanizing remark. On some level, he got it, and on another, he was used to being treated as a thing by the people of Blackedge, and she was, more than anyone else, a citizen of Blackedge. Even if she'd been dead for over eighteen years.

"Did you forget that we’re looking for Valor and Can Hu!" Adam cried, his frustration boiling to near anger, and Shiv suddenly realized that he was the one who jolted them into action a mere few seconds ago.

Right, Shiv thought, and then he noticed the glowing crevice beneath him again. When did that get made—

Uva pulled at his focus. Shiv shuddered.

"Just follow my voice and follow Adam," she spoke. "I will keep you focused. Parts of your attention will be drifting as I continue my mending. I moved your broken mind back together in haste. Some parts should not be together. You healed wrong. I need to tear at some of your mind. Be ready for a bit of… oddness."

"And what about… What about you?" Shiv asked. "What about your wounds?"

"My wounds, I can fix in time," she said dismissively, but he could still feel a cold dread lining the undercurrents of her consciousness. He knew her; they'd been intimate on a level deeper than most could imagine, and the chill that gnawed at her was of a different sort altogether than her normal, cool demeanor.

Shiv's attention jumped several times more, and twice Uva had to center him before he started another race with Adam, briefly forgetting where he was. But it took very little time for the Young Lord to spot where Valor, Can Hu, and the owl were left. Adam touched down over a dense mound of half-melted rubble. Shiv slammed deep into the earth, approximately 300 meters away from Adam to avoid any friendly fire. Debris still spiked everywhere, and the lightest discharge that followed was still devastating enough to leave a shallow crater on the pockmarked land.

From on high, the bottom of Gate Theborn looked like it had been pounded by siege spells and artillery for well over a month. That was how it seemed to Shiv, and that was the way Uva felt as well.

Shiv crossed the remaining distance without feeding his sheath any more force. Controlling it was still hard. It was a hungry layer of membrane. Practically every bit of kinetic energy he applied on himself was drawn at least somewhat into the sheath. It wanted him to go fast. It wanted to explode. And it had an effect on his mood as well.

Shiv did his best to focus. It was hard with his broken mind. More than a few times, he had to pop himself. Then he lost track of his thoughts again and just started doing it for fun. And the last time, he popped himself right beside Adam, making the Young Lord stagger.

"Stop that!" Adam hissed, barely regaining his balance. "We need to get Can Hu and Valor out!"

Uva tugged on Shiv's mind again, and a brief, tranquil moment of absolute focus followed. Right, Can Hu, Valor. They remained cemented in his mind. And with that, a flood of other memories followed as well: Valor broken and unmoving, Can Hu unresponsive. Uva then had to seal away the part of him that was hurtling towards a berserker rage.

Godsdamned Recollector, Shiv thought. When I eventually get to the Stranger's dimension—and I will find my way there. If not tomorrow, then in a thousand years, a million years. I'm going to rip the entire dimension apart.

Adam pawed at the rubble, grunting as his Skybearer’s Strength allowed him to pitch chunks of rubble three times the size of his body as if they were the size of his fist instead. Shiv sniffed and simply swept everything beneath him away with a casual swipe of a hand. Adam stepped back as a wave of force tore across the land. Shiv reached deeper, slamming his gravitic field over the mound, and he pulled. He dug down until he felt something that didn’t crack as easily as stone or obsidian. That's how he separated the teleportation anchor from the rest of the debris. With a careful tug, he tore it out from the ground, and it exploded upward, sending obsidian, concrete, glass, and more flying everywhere.

Shiv's stomach dropped, and he felt it drop two more times as both Uva and Adam feared the worst. The incredibly sturdy teleportation anchor had crumpled into a small and deformed ball during the combat of the last hour. Shiv gritted his teeth as Adam prepared to cast a Necromancy spell. He said that he wanted to shear away an edge to cut an opening so they could see within and carefully extract.

Shiv stopped listening then. Just enough anger leaked into his focus that he acted with casual, contemptuous ease. He tore the teleportation anchor open. His recent levels and his rage made the action easy. Ridiculously so. Compared to the Jealousy's teleportation anchor, the one they used as an operating base within Gate Theborn was also practically tiny.

As such, it was like opening an aluminum can.