V-14 Admission (II)

To be a recruiter for Phoenix Academy is to dedicate oneself to hunting for golden needles in a grand haystack. The students are remarkable individuals. Though young of age, many of them have already demonstrated their virtues and potential. After all, though life is harsh, and the consequences are dire, there are always those who rise to the occasion and make a name by slaying beasts that threaten their community, by proposing theorems and building the walls of their home, be it residences to house the needy or fortresses to keep the beasts at bay.

But it's not power we search for. No, everyone's power is different, and power is a relative thing. For though Vanguards might be able to smash through stone and hold a breach, our true prize may be a Pathless who defies the odds to slay a den of feral ratkin, or in one very abnormal case from my recollections, an ogre.

"For the ones that strive beyond themselves," that is the unofficial motto that guides the recruiting department of Phoenix Academy. Because that is what it means to be a Pathbearer. Above all else, it is not power; it is the demonstration of ambition cemented by a feat of unmatched resolve.

The resolve to stand, fight, and prevail even in the face of fated death or defeat.

-Master-Recruiter Harvey Lynwin of Phoenix Academy

V-14

Admission (II)

Helix's poison slipped into Shiv's body with the subtlety of a passing breeze. The Deathless had survived and resurrected from a myriad of poisons and diseases ever since his encounter with the Court Leviathan. Plagues and maladies had gone from afflictions of pain to fuel for his hypercharged immune system, dissolving internally like alcohol and taking root within his body. He should have expected Helix's spell to affect him the same way—to make him bigger, stronger, to flood his brain with that happy buzz. 

But that didn’t turn out to be the case.

At some point, he fell asleep. At some point, his heart did stop, and he woke with a sudden gasp as the pounding organ in his chest pulsed twice. The second pulse felt like a violent explosion going off against his sternum, and a rattling sensation of pain crept through his veins and crawled down into his bones. The seams of his flesh felt like vibrating cords, and the radiating pain took only a minute to resolve.

A plague-fueled haze had been triggered, and even so, the Deathless wheezed and coughed. He was afflicted with something special, something unique, as his immune system tried to corner and consume the disease. But it was always a second behind, always trying to catch up to the maladaptive changes happening within his very cells.

"Insul, are you awake again?" Helix asked.

Plaguefueled 79 > 81

Shiv's vision was bleary and doubled. The freezer was a cramped space to begin with, and now, with his plague-fueled state active, he was on the verge of getting lodged tight in the narrow crevice. A faint glow of Biomancy mana fanned out around his body, and as it did, Shiv watched as the mana of the spell faded around him like fingers vanishing into the dark. There were so many smaller shapes that made up the working that Shiv felt his mind reel as he tried to remember as much of it as he could. It was like a collage of constellations, of strings connecting micro-spell to micro-spell, each representing a fine aspect of human biology—or perhaps not human biology, but the pathology of the disease itself.

Shiv wrapped his mana hydras tight around his core, and as they delved deep, he realized the sheer complexity imbued within the poison striking at his heart. The first thing he noticed was how it constantly changed. Every second, the micro-spells rendering its structure shifted, swapping places or colliding. 

Then they bred; as two micro-spells clashed, they shattered and became four, and then four became sixteen. While this happened, other micro-spells dissolved and simply died, but the organism itself was constantly evolving, changing, adapting to his Plaguefueled faster than the Skill could swallow it.

Shiv shook his head and tried to turn. He ended up bashing his elbow against the stainless steel wall to his right. As the metal dented and then tore, Shiv winced and stopped himself from rotating any further. Through the slight gap, he could see the body beside him. He recognized it. It was that blond-haired girl that Helix tried to convince him to steal the identity of. Her eyes were open, and her chest was covered, but he knew it was really a decoy body, not the original.

"Are you feeling well, Insul," Whisper called from within Shiv's cape.

He tried to hold back a cough. "What the hell did you hit me with, Helix?"

"Simply light venom meant to stop one's heart."

"Yeah, 'light venom'," Shiv replied. "My Plaguefueled can't even keep up with it."

"Such is the purpose," Helix retorted with a scoff. "If you were capable of resisting it, you wouldn't have perished long enough to create this situation. If we're going to be doing this ridiculous scheme, we might as well follow through on it entirely and properly. Regardless, the effect should fade soon, and you will be able to signal one of the attendants to let you out."

Shiv reached out to the rip he left in the steel wall and pulled hard. His Shapeless Tides splashed against the matter, and then he inverted their direction. He used them as an anchor to draw on the wall, and with a deafening groan, he deformed the metal further and squeezed the rupture shut.

As he did that, he heard a voice call out to him from just outside. "Whoa, what was that? What was that?" There was an electronic warble in the voice.

Shiv swept the space around him using a mana hydra. Though he couldn't detect any organic substances beyond the other bodies, he did see a glowing vitality signature from a few feet away above him that told him he was dealing with an automaton. He cleared his throat and knocked weakly on the steel surface just above him.

"Help," he croaked, trying to sell the scene of a barely-Adept Pathbearer recovering from a state of near-fatal torpor. "Please, I just woke up. I don't know where I am. Help..."

He stopped knocking. A period of tense silence followed, and then suddenly there was movement. Someone pulled at his morgue freezer, and the wheels under him screeched under his weight, but still managed to hold. A mechanical grunt came as a sliver of light fell upon him, and then he found himself staring up at a set of bright lights glowing from focused crystals that swayed from the ceiling.

A three-eyed automaton leaned over him. Slowly, the Deathless turned to the automaton and managed to croak out a lie, trying to sell his state of supposed weakness. "Please, I don't know where I am. I'm supposed to be a student of Phoenix Academy. I was on an expedition from..." Shiv trailed off, trying to make it seem like he was about to pass out again, but his acting left something to be desired. 

Mostly, it seemed like he was nervous and stuttering, because, well, that was what he was. Nervous and stuttering, trying not to let this identity slip through his fingers as well.

The automaton attendant stared at him for a few seconds longer, and its three eyes shifted, spinning on its flat face. "I... I see. I must get someone to… eh… someone who isn’t me…" The automaton didn't finish speaking as it flailed out of the room. Shiv turned slowly, following its awkward, stumbling body. He realized it had wheels instead of legs, and it crashed against the wall as it blasted through the grand-oak doors leading out of this section of the morgue.

Silence returned.

Shiv was alone, aside from the orcs and Radio within his cape—discounting all the corpses too. The walls to his side were painted with classical illustrations, portraits of martyrs and heroes of the republic who fell in glorious battles. A great deal of color and detail had gone into illustrating them, and all the to-be-slain Pathbearers portrayed were unusually clean and joyous. Despite being moments away from death, people didn't look very pretty before they died. They didn't look all that attractive in the heat of battle either, but ugliness didn't make for a good story, did it? 

"The stories we tell ourselves," he muttered.

The automaton custodian returned a few minutes later with a small group of priests—or so Shiv assumed. The first thing they did wasn't to ask questions, check on him, or even cover him up. Instead, they cast a spell, unleashing a panel of Divination over his body. Violet mana caressed him as several sets of eyes flashed bright with the activation of the Analyze Skill. Shiv only figured out what they were trying to do when one made the sign of the Ascendants.

"Not a thrall! Not a risen! Praise be the Auroral Council and the Grand Protectors! A miracle has transpired! The boy is truly alive and unblighted by the foul touch of Necromancy!"

Shiv released a breath as the gathered mob took him into their care. They dressed him in a set of black robes and slippers while guiding him out of the room into one of the private consultation quarters in the Royal Morgue. The building was vast. From all the vitalities Shiv could sense, there must have been thousands of people in here, spread across approximately twenty or so stories. It seemed to be built like a clump of light as well, with Shiv currently being on the twelfth level down. 

The royal morgue had been built like an inverted tower embedded into the earth, rather than a risen structure. Judging by the filigrees of mithril and gold, a substantial amount of wealth had been spent during its construction.

The murals he saw within the room continued on. They sprawled across the ceiling and decorated every column and wall he came across. There seemed to be no shortage of fallen heroes who perished in the service of the Republic. On the way to his temporary quarters, he noticed how there were painters hard at work, adding new martyrs into the sprawling tapestry. Art and propaganda had a habit of blending into each other. Both of them preyed upon stories and idealism, and one was so easily compelled to serve the other.

Shiv didn't know why he was so drawn to the paintings. It could be because he'd seen far too much death in far too intense a time. It had scarred him. It had imprinted on him. He didn't have an issue killing, but with all the savagery and bloodshed he participated in, he could still see their faces and their wounds. He remembered the abrupt brutality that accompanied each of their ends. For the Republic and the bards who cared for the fate of the fallen, death was a full stop or a final poignant line in a story. 

For Shiv, death was less than punctuation; it was functionally a blessing for him to indulge in over and again.

There's something wrong with these images, Shiv thought, his eyes jumping from mural to mural. Just as he looked upon them, he felt them looking back, and a growing weight of paranoia crept through him as he couldn't shake the feeling that he was being watched. Better treat them like surveillance. Who knows what kind of bullshit powers the Ascendants still have. Painting and Awareness. Yeah…

As they sat him down in the consultation room, they brought him a warm glass of water accompanied by some bread, beans, and broccoli. He made sure to eat the food like a ravenous wolf, spouting generalities about who he was and what he remembered between every bite. The gathered priests listened on intently, as if he was a new prophet given unto them by the Ascendants themselves.

"A miracle!" an elven woman clad in dark blue robes exclaimed. A flowing cape swayed from her right shoulder, and emblazoned upon it was the face of Halsur, bearing his voltage shield in one hand and his bolt-shaped spear in the other. "Notify the university immediately!"

An old goblin wheezed, so aged that they had to walk with magical aids. A weight-bracing set of straps held the goblin upright, while crystals embedded upon its backside rippled with weak pulses of Dynamancy. "The Phoenix must send one of their own to verify this information." That was exactly what Shiv wanted. That was what he planned with Irons.

"Patience, Master Edelbert," a man among the priests chided. This man was human, but he was not dressed in any robes. In fact, aside a pair of ruptured and worn slacks, he was barefoot, and his flesh was horrifically scarred. Considering how his left arm seemed ritualistically severed, the cut being too clean and neat to be a wound inflicted during combat, Shiv knew this one was one of Cripple's fervent apostles. "He has been through an ordeal. If the dark hand of death has been repelled by this boy's soul, then surely he is Ascendant-favored."

"That is not in doubt," the goblin shook his head. "It is not matters of the spirit I am wary of, but questions of the mind. Favored though he may be, I've seen such things before." The elderly goblin coughed. "Tell me, boy. You have no wounds on you. So, what do you remember? How do you remember returning? Please, tell us, if you may."

Shiv adopted a stressed expression and tried to sell them on his story, delving through his fabricated memories. The follower of Cripple chided his fellow priest once more, but Shiv spoke. "It was like nothing for a while. Like I was deeper than the deepest sleep I've ever taken. But then I woke up and there was this pain in my chest. My heart… It was like my heart woke up with me. Like it was about to burst open inside me…”

"Ah, poison then," the goblin huffed. "As I expected. There have been many cases where foul poisons have caused the circulation of blood within a Pathbearer to congeal or slow. Yet, thanks to their enduring toughness, they manage to pull themselves back from the brink. Tremendous. Truly tremendous." The goblin sighed. "Yet, a lack of oxygen inflicts other maladies upon the body as well. After all, the mind is connected to the blood, and seeing as it choked, I fear that many Pathbearers find their cognition permanently reduced, even after such a miraculous recovery. Tell me, boy, how is your memory?"

"Hazy," Shiv said, trying to play along. The gathered priests asked him a few more questions about what he could recall, but soon retreated and left him to his peace. Within the consultation room, Shiv sat and waited. Soon, Phoenix Academy would be sending a representative to come and claim him. After that, he just needed to get behind the walls and finish the admissions process.

Then, he would be a whole new person. At least for a while.

"Have the grovelers left?" Tequila whispered from inside Shiv's cape.

"Yeah," Shiv replied, but he narrowed his eyes at a representation of the thirteen Ascendants detailing the ceiling above him. He saw each of them in their exaggerated glory: Starhawk with his resplendent wings and bow soaring above; Enoch, represented by a faint, shrouded figure wreathed by the sun, landing on the apex of a tremendous tower; Kathereine, singing and wreathed by the magic of her own musical notes; and Halsur not far away, bearing a shield and spear for her protection.

Cripple and the others were present as well, all of them looking glorious in diminished ways. Might not be a room specifically dedicated to them.  Even Daughter wasn't a nightmarish being of psychopathy and horror, but more a shadowy protector, embracing a sobbing, lost girl.

Yeah. That’s Daughter, alright. Not some kind of psycho-killer who wears little girls. Definitely not.

A sigh escaped from Shiv as he considered the faith of his republic, the faith that consumed his fellow citizens. He'd gotten lucky in a way; his alienation from his own society prevented him from developing the faith skill. In turn, he'd accepted the fact that his gods were ultimately either weak-willed fools or cold, monstrous bastards far easier than it would be for most. Shiv still felt a swell of bitterness when it came to his own past, but now, it seemed things weren't so simple. Sometimes, enduring one wound can help you avoid another.

There came a sudden knock at the door, and Shiv flinched. He nearly summoned his Last Morsel to his hand before he caught himself. I am just a physically crippled, but medically-gifted, Low-Adept, Shiv reminded himself. Physical violence can't be my solution in public. Not if I want to keep this identity longer than a few minutes.

That didn't mean he couldn't use his magical skills. He pointed a mana hydra through the door, and his Biomancy wrapped around a robust physique. The magical outline of the person was rendered, and Shiv felt a hefty weight press down upon his Biomancy field. The one he was sensing was mentally strong. Their bones were like metal rods, and their tendons were like cords of steel. Shiv guessed they had mastered their physicality skill at the least, and after a second longer, managed to decipher their sex as well. 

The micro-spells representing the person's genitalia and other minor details told him a woman was waiting behind the doorway, and around her were the priests from earlier. Shiv had no idea who to expect—perhaps someone else from the morgue who wanted to talk with him.

Practical Metabiology 44 > 45

"Come in," Shiv said. He cringed at how hoarse and soft Marcus’s voice was. It sounded far too much like a whimper for Shiv’s comfort. Stick to the cover. Deal with it.

The door opened, and a battle-hardened woman stepped in. She wore a thick alloy vest, and carved into the front of her sleeveless cuirass were two wolves chasing each other's tail. One of them radiated waves of Pyromancy, and judging from the design of the other, Shiv suspected it was infused with Cryomancy, portraying a kind of elemental balance. The next thing of note about the woman were the two axes hanging from her hips. They seemed to be one-handed weapons and their edges sparked with faint arcs of electricity. The flat sides of the blades were also decorated with glistening spell-symbols.

And then there was her face. Her hair was done up in a dense braid of green, with thin bones threaded in between the fibers, running all the way down to her lower back. Three scars ran along her lower lip, and painted trails just underneath her right cheek looked like she took a claw to the face, and it never healed properly. While he was observing her, she looked back at him, but she wasn't studying him. No, she had a very obvious glare in her eyes—the type of glare one reserved for someone they scorned, or an enemy they intended to slay.

"The hell is her deal?" Shiv thought to himself. "Wait, does she know Marcus? Ah, hells, system. Barely had this identity for longer than a few minutes. Don't do this shit to me right now."

Slowly, she marched into the room as the priests chattered away behind her. They muttered things like "a miracle" and "Ascendant-blessed." Through it all, she said nothing. The intense animosity in her eyes never faded, however, and Shiv grew increasingly sure that her uncoiling hatred was directed toward Marcus for some reason.

"Yes," she said, her voice coarse as if made so from a lifetime of yelling. "Truly a miracle. But, holy ones, if I may, can I be granted a moment of privacy?" She made the gesture of the Ascendants, tracing a cross into the air with her right hand before splitting it down the middle. "We have suffered a great deal during the expedition, and it warms my heart to see another of my kinfolk survive, even if it is in such... miraculous circumstances. But the expedition, the losses we took, were truly sorrowful, and I wish to know how he feels in private."

"Certainly, Magnolia of Lutherbrook," the goblin wheezed. "We understand how this may be an emotional moment for you, to find another Pathbearer under your charge lost but returned. In their light, we flourish."

"In their light, we flourish," the other priests echoed. One after another, they shuffled out from the room, and as the door closed, Shiv found himself left alone with a woman whose body language trembled on the verge of violence.

Psycho-Cartography: Look at her face. Look at how tight her shoulders are. Look at the glare in her eyes. It's taking everything she has not to retrieve one of those hand-axes and bury it in your skull. Whatever Marcus did, she hates him. Hates him a lot. But there is something else. She knows she's not justified in killing him. Otherwise, she likely would have acted already.

A tense silence unfolded, and Shiv watched Magnolia's lip curl, revealing a mouthful of clenched teeth. "Of course it was you, Unblood. You bastard. Of course you were the one who came back, not my Opal."

Shiv blinked. He had no idea who the hell this woman was talking about, but Marcus probably did. That being said, he could probably piece a few things together. Her Opal. This woman was likely speaking of a child, judging from the seraphic warmth in her tone. Furthermore, it seemed like she blamed him for Opal's death.

"Have you nothing to say, you curse-spawn cur? You vile vermin?" As she hissed her hatred at him, Shiv felt his own anger begin to reflexively rise, but he caught himself before he could return a threat and bite back at a woman who seemed desperate to start a fight.

She might have been. The Legendary Deathless Shiv might be strong enough to crush this woman like an insect, but Marcus was just an adept. A crippled one at that, lacking any proper martial skills. So, in the absence of having anything to say and not wanting to give himself away, Shiv decided to keep silent. He remained impassive, and the blank look on his face drove the woman to a new height of rage. 

She started to tremble.

"Nothing! Nothing! You say nothing to me now? After a lifetime of defiance, after never knowing when to control your pride and tongue, now you think it proper to be ashamed? To be quiet? Now?!" She slammed the bottom of her fist atop the table between them, and it rattled and then shattered into splinters of wood. The tray Shiv ate from tumbled through the air and ricocheted off his forehead. He didn't even blink.

"No," the woman hissed again, and he tasted a faint whiff of alcohol on her breath. The point of her finger came close to his eye, and he saw the faintest sparks of electricity building there. "I will not accept this. I will not accept that you are the one that came back. You of all people. Motherless, fatherless, ruined, crippled thing that should have died before leaving the womb. You mistake of a child. You take my battle sister away from me in childbirth," a hysterical laugh bowled free from the woman, "and then you have the audacity to spill your seed into my daughter! To impregnate her?”

This time, Shiv flinched slightly. Okay, he thought to himself, that shit came out of nowhere. The hells were you doing, Marcus?

"Mine!" Magnolia repeated for a third time as her lip quivered. "Mine! And you let your bastard seed fill her with bastard offspring! And instead of being righteous for once in your life, instead of letting me solve your problem, you turn her against me! You twist the mind of the recruiter! You make them force me to take you on, to bring you on this expedition to the capital! You steal a spot meant for someone better so you can go to the academy! You! YOU!"

Shiv's instincts screamed out to him to strike first—to rip her apart before she struck first. She was on the verge of going for one of her axes. He could feel it. He couldn't stay silent much longer unless he wanted this to end in a fight. He doubted she could harm him, even if he didn't focus on strengthening his core. The mana powering her axes had little hope of overcoming his Shapeless Tides, and the material of the axe itself would chip and shatter upon greeting his Orichalcum-hard skin. After that, though, his cover would be effectively blown, preservable only if he eliminated this woman.

But that led into a chain of other issues. Killing her wouldn't be hard. Shiv could stop time right now, stand up, and simply pull her head free from her torso, and there would be nothing she could do to stop him. But what would he do with the body after that? 

He could completely mangle it into a ball using his Biomancy and hide it within his cape, but that wouldn't solve the problem of her disappearance. What the hell was he going to tell the priests when they came in and found her missing? He would be the prime suspect, considering that he was the last person to be in her presence. And that would leave a trail for the Inquisition to follow. 

The miraculous resurrection of some kid in a morgue was bad enough. A kid in a morgue who makes a Master-Tier Pathbearer disappear after a conversation? Yeah. This cover wasn't going to last beyond that.

Godsdamned system, Shiv thought to himself. He knew the peace couldn't last. He knew the system was going to try to pull him back into that cycle of bloodshed. But Shiv had more options than just violence now. At the very least, he could be verbally and psychologically violent. And so, without any better options, Shiv decided to go on the offensive like his instincts demanded.

The social offensive.

If I can get her to lose control and get the priests back in or stall until someone gets here. Might give me an out.

"Yeah," Shiv said, leaning back into his chair and adopting an utterly different expression. He even rolled his eyes for good measure. "Cut my head off. Drive those blades into my corpse over and over again until I stop twitching. That'll make your daughter happy."

Magnolia's mouth fell open and slammed back together so hard Shiv heard one of her teeth crack. "You... you..."

"Yeah, me, me," he replied, not bothering with the whole confused child act anymore. He wasn't sure where he was going with this yet, but if he could be provoked into making a loud enough ruckus, maybe the priests would return and spare this poor, unfortunate woman from getting turned into a ball of flesh.

"How dare you," she whispered. A tear dropped from her left eye—a tear of pure rage. She bit down on her anger as Shiv kept going with his lashing words.

"What do you mean, 'how dare'? I dared because I'm a Pathbearer. I dared because I could. I did. And that's the way it is. You know, you talk a lot about me, me, me, everything I did. How about everything you did, huh? If you were such a good mother, if I was such a terrible person, why'd you let me beat you at every turn? I mean, my Physicality's crippled. I'm a literal crippled orphan. How are you going to let someone like that outdo you, impregnate your daughter, and then end up coming to see them with a straight face?" Shiv held out his hands in utter disbelief. "It's pathetic. And now you’re here whimpering to me instead of handling it like a proper Pathbearer.”

Something in her face broke. "You... you... you don't know anything!"

"I seem to know plenty," Shiv shot back, folding his arms. "Seem to know your daughter well enough to make you a grandma."

"She was poisoned by your words! By your act of feeble, tragic determination!"

"I don't know, it seems I knew her pretty well. And she knew me, too." Shiv wiggled his eyebrows. "Sticks and Stones, right? Call me a cripple, and I’ll call you mom. How about that?”

Sticks and Stones 58 > 60

Her entire body tensed. Her flesh turned brittle and glass-like. The woman shook with rage. One of her axes found its way into her right hand, but she was caught between the urge to let it fly and strike him down or to hold herself at bay. "You didn't know my daughter. You don't know me."

"I'd beg to differ," Shiv said. "Seems I knew her well enough to do all kinds of things. Hell, I knew her probably better than you did." A choked snarl escaped from the woman and Shiv, riding a high of audacity and verbal bullshit, kept going. "After all, I was the one who got her pregnant. Not you. I guess that means it's just 1-0 for me, am I right?"

Magnolia's face went blank for a moment. His audacity had rendered her mind befuddled. And then he had made the mistake of grinning at her, and that sent her over the edge. Her hand shot out. Quick—but not fast enough. Shiv had to force himself to sit still and wait as she pulled at his collar and tore his loaned clothes.

Low Master Reflexes. Yeah. Not the guy you should be fighting, Magnolia. Not smart. And then he watched her commit to her mistake; she lifted her axe high and let out a feral snarl. Not smart at all.