IV-15 Riot (II)

Ah! Dungeons and jails! My favorite place to socialize and meet new friends. Naturally, because I don’t like being captured, I usually sneak in myself and hide in the walls.

You learn a lot of things when hiding in people’s walls. You learn about their habits, what they like, what times they touch themselves, how long they cry afterward, and also what they’re good at.

It’s how I recruit helpers for my heists these days. Because most people are in a dungeon for a reason, and some of them are actually more unlucky than incompetent.

If you can find those people, you can put together a pretty good crew.

Anyway, I want to say thanks to all nation states across Integration. Keep capturing the most dangerous, mentally deranged Pathbearers in existence. Saves me the trouble of hunting for them organically.

-The Legendary Thief Velie Roberie, “Ms. Avarice.”

IV-15
Riot (II)

Inertial Overdrive 130 > 132

Farsight 53 > 56

Strider of the Unbending Path 153 > 155

Golemancy 12 > 15

Outside Context Problem 88 > 92

Vitaemancy 95 > 97

And then she was upon him again, ripping into his Vitae with a primal howl. Shiv barely managed to follow the Waif’s movements thanks the aura of lifeforce painting her presence. He projected a burst of tides out from his final fiber of white-red mana. A clash followed. The first of the Waif’s blows were halted by his counterforce. A cracked sounded as part of her blade fractured, and the Waif screamed aloud.

Shiv couldn’t tell if she was suffering from pleasure or pain.

But then she was everywhere. An leash of vitality came aglow, connecting her to other spots in the crawlspace. A second thereafter, Shiv saw a dozen more life signatures coming at him through the chaotic darkness. With little vitality left, he couldn’t dive out of context. I need to change things. This felling girl is a psychopath. I can’t tell if she just wants to put me down or take me alive anymore.

“Now this is getting fun! Fun! Fun!” The Waif shrieked. The other signatures rushed in, and the sheer speed at which they moved tore pockets in the tar-black substance still clinging to Shiv. He caught sight of more versions of the Waif. Yet they were obvious replicas of her—they seemed to be made from straw and leaking a pitch-black substance from their eyes and mouths.

Shiv halted time with his Strider of the Unbending Path Skill. The straw-replicas went still. The original Waif continued coming at him, slashing in wide and scything arcs. Yet, the Waif herself had changed. Her voice turned to an animalistic snarl, and he felt an inhuman hand burst out from the darkness and grip his Vitae tight. 

The hand was too pale, too taut of skin to be human and he could see veins underneath. He could see segmented bone greeting him and through the dark he caught sight of the Ascendant's face for the first time. 

A golden aura veiled them, and the Waif was nested within their translucent body. The Ascendant’s face was a splash of paleness amidst the choking blackness that held Shiv in place. The Ascendant was beyond deformed. They had one eye that was a little too large compared to the other. The other eye seemed only half grown because part of the skull had been caved in or was simply pressed from the moment of birth. Its nose hung swung like a pendulum over its mouth and between wide drooping lips were pointed teeth that resembled needles more than anything else. 

A foul odor assailed Shiv's nostrils. Shiv thought his armor was feeding him pheromones, but then he realized he was dead. The Voidmantid armor wasn’t on him right now.  This smell was magical—and worse than that, it was a skill he couldn’t ignore. The taste grew so foul that Shiv wanted to retch, but lacked the organs to do so.

"You know how much it takes from me," the Ascendant whispered. They struck out twice more using the wicked dagger wielded by the Waif. Shiv noticed the cracks on the dagger were gone now. But more than that, he noticed a faint glimmer of divine mana radiating out from the dagger. It took his full concentration to ward off the Ascendant’s blows using his Shapeless Tides. With every flick, their blade vanished from sight and cuts greeted his strand-thin body. Fragments of Vitae burst free from what remained of Shiv, but he kept himself alive by unleashing bursting vectors that halted and repelled the countless blows.

Shiv’s concentration and speed were strained to the limit. With every burst of force he exerted, his Inertial Overdrive climbed—and that meant the strain on his body grew more severe as well. A Pillar of Orichalcum rose from the tendril that was Shiv, and soon the Ascendant’s blade was carving shallow grooves into his Toughness Skill instead of him.

Even so, he was a breath away from true death, and found himself trying not to plunge off a treacherous edge. If he failed to repel the Ascendant with his Reflexes and Physicality, then they would cut him down. If he didn’t increase his Toughness, his Inertial Overdrive would see him destroyed.

Inertial Overdrive 132 > 133

Pillar of Orichalcum 231 > 232

Multi-Tasking 24 > 27

As the Ascendant flicked and slashed, bursting in and out of the darkness, Shiv felt his temporal shell begin to crack and knew his time was running out. A thrust came at him from the left—but vanished and materialized on his right. He had to revert himself a second in time to send his force-vectors in the right direction.

A resounding clash shook the crawlspace. The Ascendant laughed. “You asked for a name earlier! So, I will greet you properly. I am Daughter the Deadly, and you are delectable prey. So resilient. So desperate to live. Ah, what struggle! What strength!” As they spoke Shiv caught sight of the girl, the girl hiding inside the nightmarish Ascendant's transparent flesh. She was staring at him with malice and glee, swallowed by her possessing god; wearing her god, as if they were a suit of armor. 

"Do you know how much I wish to just close my fist and end you?" the Ascendant continued.

The Deathless didn’t reply. He didn’t have the focus. Instead, he gathered more overflow tides to keep himself alive. The Ascendant was unrelenting, unceasing, unyielding. He needed to match them. More than that, he needed to turn this into an offensive. If he could just touch them, he would be able to rip the vitality out of them and resurrect. But it was too much. His mind screamed with strain. There was just too much he had to do at once. His temporal shell was cracking; time was literally running out.

I need to counterattack, but the Ascendant’s too fast. I’m not fast—wait, no, I’m a damned idiot.

Shiv was only relying his own skills, but he had new shoes. Shoes that allowed him to sink into darkness. He didn’t think it would help him hide from the Ascendant for long, but it should throw them off. The Ascendant’s strikes grew frenzied—they were pushing him to the edge. Cuts lined his pillar. Shiv a few more pieces, and shivered beneath the cold-touch of impending oblivion. 

He threaded a string of Vitae out through the blackness, groping for his corpse, searching for the new shoes that. As soon as he made contact, the equipment gained notification appeared before his eyes.

Equipment Obtained: [Nightwalkers]

Tier: Master

Condition: Stable

Composition: Shadeleather; Spatial Magic

Enchantments > Nightswim; Last Step of Midnight; Self-Mending

Shit… Please work…

He activated his Nightswim Enchantment just as his temporal shell broke. Time resumed. The straw-made Waifs came from him, trailing blackness from their screaming mouths. They tore through the air and fell upon nothing as Shiv had turned into a puddle of darkness. The Ascendant was gone. The original Waif too their place, but she was momentarily surprised by what Shiv just did—

And then doubly surprised as he used the shoe’s Last Step of Midnight.

The tar-black substance unleashed by the Waif worked against her for the first time. It gave Shiv plenty of charge to perform a Nightswim, and it also gave him an instant teleportation option to further confuse his adversary. The Ascendant was fast—-but Shiv’s Inertial Overdrive sounded like tides of debris slamming together time and again. He was faster than he had ever been, and that was all it took.

The moment of surprise gave him a microsecond for an opening. His amplified Reflexes allowed him to seize the advantage.

He flung himself forward. His Orichalcum column slammed against the Waif’s body. The moment of surprise ended. She cleaved—but he was already draining from her. A surge of vitality flowed from the avatar into Shiv, and he went from a string to an explosion of spreading Vitae.

For the first time, Waif cried out in genuine agony as they were sapped—and Shiv kept draining from her. He resurrected. Her cut went wide and he seized her arm. Instead of crushing her body, this time, he used her as a shield against her straw-replicas while draining her continuously.

“Not fair! Not fair!” The girl shrieked. “You surprised me!”

Shiv chose to drain more of her vitality as a response. She kicked and writhed, and though she was impossibly strong for her size, Shiv was beyond conventional strength. Shiv converted the force she exerted into overflow tides and used that to accelerate both of them through a horde of her straw-replicas and into a mithril support.

A resounding crash followed. She tried cutting him again, but he had her knife-hand in a vice grip. He pinned her against the mithril pillar and continued savaging her vitality. The Waif let out a weakening groan, and then it was Shiv’s turn to grin viciously.

“Who’s the prey now?” He snarled.

Her eyes snapped open, and as she grinned, her teeth fell out, replaced by the needle-thin teeth the Ascendant had. “Still you!”

Shiv’s instincts screamed at him to flee. He left context just as the Ascendant’s ethereal form ruptured out from her body and ripped through the space he once occupied. The Waif exploded into a blast of all-consuming blackness, and as Shiv tried to navigate his way out from the miasma, his pulse quickened as he realized the Ascendant had vanished without a trace.

Shit. Shiv grimaced as he tried to figure out his next steps. Getting out of here himself was a good idea, but something told him that the Daughter the Deadly wouldn’t be the easiest to shake. Regardless, he accelerated through the crawlspace and made for the next cube over. He couldn’t stay in place.

As soon as he passed through the thick tar left behind by the Waif and passed through a few gears, he surfaced from his soul to preserve vitality. His senses were screaming at him, and he used the enchantments on his Voidmantid armor to try and track the Ascendant and her avatar. That immediately proved to be a mistake as the foul odor in the air made Shiv pull his helmet open and vomit.

Systems, it’s like a dead-rat took a wet shit down by throat, he gagged. Just want kind of bullshit skill is this?

Shiv took a second to regain his bearings. He was fighting an elusive foe, one that hid and swam through the darkness around him. Seeing as he just threw up, he expected the Ascendant to be on him once more. He did have one edge though: He used his Vitamancy to track their life force. Ascendants and avatars had a pretty big weakness in that they were infused with so much vitality that it was impossible not to see them if they were—

A flash of pain spread across both of Shiv's hamstrings. He swiped his aegis of assimilation down, expecting to find his tendon split, but the truth was worse than that. He tried to assimilate the injury into his biomancy field, but couldn't. Couldn't because he was leaking darkness from his wounds. As he looked down, he saw a small hand extend out from his injuries, wiggling at him in a casual taunt. Just then, another two cuts painted paths of pain across his torso and cheek. The blows cleaved through his Orichalcum pillar and armor like they weren’t there at all. 

A third attack came, but Shiv got lucky—noticed it coming. A rush of lifeforce went from impossibly fast to a lesser but still staggering velocity. He tried to intercept her slash but failed to turn in time. Yet, rather than keeping his throat slit, the dagger dug a few centimeters out of his Orichalcum pillar and went no further. 

Understanding passed through Shiv. He realized her skills were amplified by stealth. If he didn’t notice her, she was faster, stronger, and her cuts passed through his armor as if it wasn’t there.

Unfortunately, this epiphany didn’t mean he had a solution. Especially when she burst out from one of his tar-infested wounds. Shiv cried out in pain as the Waif drove her blade upward. A length of metal was digging chunks out of his pelvic bone in an instant. By the time he noticed her and allowed his Toughness to take true effect, her cut had glided halfway across his taint and was resting against the underside of his privates.

Shiv didn’t wail in agony, but it was a near thing. He left context once more. As soon as he did, he found the Waif displaced from inside his body, and that made him feel a special kind of disturbed. Whatever that skill this was, it allowed her to invade his flesh after cutting him. That, and her blade

“Come the felling fuck on! Of all the places you can stab me! Here? Really?” He groaned as he bled from a variety of wounds. He examined his injuries to make sure he wasn't oozing blackness anymore. It seemed that he needed to be in context for that skill to work. That also meant he could feed these damages into his Aegis of Assimilation to mend himself. “Can’t let her keep cutting me. The hells with this, I don’t want to be anywhere near her.”

He pointed his Shapeless Tides toward the nearest Orichalcum wall. Part of him wanted to fight to show the Ascendant that he was no prey, that he was a Legendary Pathbearer who could contend with a god. But that was just pride talking. Pride and his ingrained need to brawl. I have to be smarter than that now. She’s not going to let me drain her like earlier and her skills are too godsdamned strange. I need to get out of this fight before she accidentally kills me for good.

Just then, the Waif blinked into existence right behind him. Shiv nearly jumped out of his Vitae.

The Waif's eyes burned bright violet, and she stared right at him. Her head was tilted, and it was only then that Shiv noticed he was looking at an entirely different girl. She wasn’t nearly as chubby as the last one, and had an enduring frown instead of a cruel smirk lining her face.

Suddenly, a sick feeling came over him as he considered a few horrible possibilities: Just how many avatars did Daughter have? And were these girls willing avatars?

What the fuck even is the Yellowstone Republic…

If he didn’t want to stick around before, it was doubly worse now. The Ascendant’s Intimidation Skill was grinding against Shiv’s psyche. He was probably more resistant that most, but that didn’t make him immune either. 

He pulled hard in the opposite direction of his Inertial Overdrive, and Shiv hissed as he felt part of his hip get wrenched out of place. He fed that into one of his Biomantic mana-hydras as well. Once more, he really needed to improve his Multi-Tasking skill. He wasn't capable of fighting at maximum capacity if he couldn't improve both his Toughness, manage his Inertial overdrive, and gather more overflow tides at once.

A Legend wasn’t made a Legend by a single skill, but a concert of supporting skills allowing the Legendary Skill to operate at peak capacity. Every time he got stronger, the lack of these supporting skills grew more and more evident.

Multi-Tasking 27 > 28

His Vitae shuddered around him like a candle in a snowstorm. He was spending himself fast to stay unnoticed by the Waif, but she clung close to him with a curious expression on her face.

“What’s that, my Ascendant?” The new Waif said. She didn’t sound half as happy as the last Waif. “Oh. O-okay. I’ll keep following them. Whoever they are.” Her lip quivered, and Shiv felt the faintest connection form between him and the girl. It was like wisps of air swirling between them, but the sensation was unmistakable. “I-if you’re out there, c-come out. The Ascendant demands it.” She bit her lip and clutched a new, more wicked dagger with two shaking hands.

She was afraid. She didn’t want to be here. And she didn’t have a say.

Immediately, Kathereine was dethroned as his least favorite Ascendant. Shiv was coming for Daughter’s head for whatever sick, twisted shit they were doing to these girls. The last Waif might’ve been a little psycho, but the new one just acted like a scared kid. They could be faking, but from the way her eyes darted about, like she was trying not to jump at every shadow, Shiv had a feeling she was genuinely terrified.

Psycho-Cartography: It’s likely also a deliberate tactic used by the Ascendant against you. They’re trying to figure out your moral limits. The last girl was more psychotic animal than human child. This one seems to be a victim, and we don’t have it in us to murder a kid with our two hands. Or maybe that’s just what we tell ourselves. Whatever the case, we need to get out of here before Daughter deepens her offensive. Get into the next cube and find a place to break contact or create a mana storm inside here.

He looked around for an easy exit, and he noticed how the gap left in the neighboring cube from the stream of soulfire earlier was growing even larger. Bits of Orichalcum dripped down as bright white slag, and Shiv pointed his Bladewand of fire's path in the direction of the opening. A dense thread of Pyromancy speared out from the tip of his wand. Right, now things get messy.

Shiv exploded free from his Outside Context State. The new Waif flinched back in surprise. Shiv responded by halting time so he would end up facing the Ascendant instead. Once more, the Ascendant’s disfigured form materialized over the girl in a splash of golden mana. They let out a scream of displeasure at the sight of Shiv and blurred out of sight in an instant. Shiv tried to follow where they were going, but he also had to continue projecting his Bladewand’s teleportation, leaving him stuck in place. “Godsdammit—”

“Here I am!" a cheerful voice rang from behind. There was a flick of motion under his chin, and the Deathless gurgled as his neck was opened. Another cut bit into his vertebrae, but he went out of context before it could sink all the way in. His Bladewand flickered as his teleportation was interrupted. Darkness crept along the corners of his vision, but Shiv managed to have his Biomancy absorb his wounds first. 

He surfaced a second later in a two-pronged attack. His Biomancy crashed hard against the Ascendant’s Magical Resistance—and while they shrugged that off, he palmed their head and channeled every vector he had into him. He felt a satisfying crack pulse through their body, and inside their translucent form, the new Waif writhed in the Ascendant’s stead.

“It hurts! Hurts so bad!” She screamed.

Shiv’s stomach did a flip. Hurting the Ascendant was fine, but if he couldn’t attack them directly even with time frozen—

Blind luck saved Shiv from another death. One of his overflow vectors was washing up along his head, and it crashed against a blade that descended on his crown. A spike of agony exploded atop his skull. The Deathless cried out in a snarl of pain as cold and slimy fingers curled around his face. He didn’t know who was attacking him—how they got to him, but he felt a length of unnatural metal dig a deep groove along the curve of his skull. 

A horrific rattling noise filled the insides of Shiv's head. His teeth clacked together in his mouth. He turned, trying to knock the girl aside, but his right arm stopped moving. Then he felt something wrong with his left leg as well. A half second thereafter, he realized a problem. Both his right arm and left leg had been taken from him, clean slices severing them free of his body. But that wasn't the worst of it. 

While there was one Ascendant standing in the air before him, grinning happily, two others had joined her. Two others that looked exactly like them, wielding the same knives. And they were holding on to Shiv's limbs now, clutching them tight to their misshapen bodies as if they were trophies. And then they started chewing on his severed limbs, feasting on the blood with ravenous delight.

"What the hells?" Shiv growled. He was more disturbed by the cannibalism than bothered by the pain.

“Cute trick, little bull,” the Daughter before him said. She pointed to her dagger and Shiv noticed that a section of it was chipped. "Guess it serves me right to underestimate a Legend, even a baby legend." She blew a raspberry at him. 

Shiv tried to activate his Outside Context Problem again, but an unseen blow took him under the ribs. He managed to convert some of it, but the bulk of the force punctured one of his lungs and sent him slamming against an Orichalcum wall.

Shiv fought to recover. Another lashing strike to the temple brought an end to that. Whatever attack he couldn’t perceive ignored his defenses entirely. His vision doubled. A rush of bile climbed up his throat as he tried to keep his nausea down. He lashed out with two cuts of his own, but remembered he was missing the requisite limb.

He managed to sink into his Vitae again at the last minute. And it was barely enough to save his life. The Ascendant’s dagger punched through where he was and left a deep hole in the Orichalcum wall behind him.

Shit. Not good. Not good at all. As he fed his mana hydras and restored his limbs, he saw a small army of Daughters with Waifs lodged inside them darting from place to place. Most flickered in and out of sight. They vanished behind mithril columns and failed to reappear. Shiv counted twenty of them at least, and they were faintly tied together by a shared chain of vitality.

He had no idea how the Daughter functioned, but his odds against one were messy. Twenty? He was going to get massacred. He looked around, trying to find that soulfire-induced opening on the Orichalcum surface he lay against, but he found himself utterly lost. He was running out of Vitae fast, too.

When he re-entered the Integration again, he was probably going to die. And die fast. After that—

Ideas. I need… I need…

Something exploded out from the Orichalcum five meters beside Shiv. It was around five meters in size and resembled a large, muscular humanoid with many tentacles sticking out from its head. Shiv did a double-take as he realized what it was. Is that a giant felling Vulteg?

“NO ONE CAN HOLD HIGH MARSHAL URRI TATTALO!” The Vulteg bellowed.

Around ten wardens clung to the large Vulteg’s body as he smashed through a mithril pillar. The wardens screamed out to each other, and a few were still shaping spells, trying to stop the octopus-headed brute from getting free. 

"Hold him!”

Prepare the net! Animancers on the ready!”

“Psychomancers on standby!"

Just then Shiv noticed a dense weave of Animancy mana pulsing along Urri’s body. It was interesting seeing a faint blueness seep into the Vulteg, but Shiv decided to take this chance and escape through the massive rupture the Vulteg made. Shiv promptly dropped a temporal anchor as well, not sure what was being prepared. His instincts screamed at him to give himself an out or an easy option to reposition later.

Okay Shiv, breathe. New plan, new plan. What the hell is our new plan? He was almost out of vitality and being pursued by a multi-bodied cannibalistic Ascendant that used children as avatars and meat-shields while prison went to hell around them.

In a strange way, Shiv was flattered. Back when he was Pathless, he would have been impressed if he managed to overcome a small group of lesser vampires in direct combat. Now it took the avatar of a false god and additional aid to send him on the run. That aside, Shiv was in some deep shit. He needed to figure out how to shake the Ascendant fast, because he didn't think he had many lucky breaks left. His Shapeless Tide, Vitality Drain, and Outside Context Problem were the only skills he had of use against her. 

Maybe vitality drain as well, but he doubted she would make the same mistake again. Alright, thanks Shiv. What can we do? What do we got?

He considered calling for aid, but he didn't think Bonk would be particularly useful in this fight. But what about Rebis? Maybe he's a lot faster than me, and his cutting aura might be able to keep Daughter at bay. Still have no idea how her skills actually work, or how many bodies she even has. 

He counted twenty of her earlier, and he wasn't even sure if those were her actual bodies. He'd broken her avatars a few times, and all that did was leave him drowning in a dense, tar-black substance. So he couldn't attack her directly. He couldn't evade her for long. Maybe Rebis could give him some help, but even with all that, the only means of attack he had left was draining her vitality, and that meant getting close over and over again. 

Wait, Shiv blinked. Vitality drain? I don't need to drain her. I just need to make things more chaotic down here. A mana storm might make it hard for her to track us at all. I can keep the magic at bay with my Legendary-Tier Skill.

And so he emerged from his Outside Context Problem state and called out to Rebis. "Rebis, come out. Need a hand here. We got an Ascendant on our ass.”

And in an instant, the Amalgamated Pathbearer was right beside him. They trembled. Their wings were expanded wide. And for a moment, judging from the fury on the amalgamated path bearer's face, Shiv was worried that Rebis might cut him down first. But Rebis maintained his self-control. 

"Ascendant! Where?" Rebis choked out.

“Watch the gap,” Shiv pointed behind at the opening they just slipped through. They were at the very top of a prison-valley. Below, there were hundreds of wardens trying to contain dozens of prisoners, and things were going badly. Shiv could see tsunamis of flame smashing down along the narrow channel below. Several wardens disintegrated outright.

There’s no frying pan in this place at all. It’s all fire by this point. Well. Time to add to it.

Shiv started draining from reality. If he couldn't lose the Ascendant in the crawlspace and the cube was a trap, then he needed to create his own chaos. Make things even more murky. Make things even more confusing. Shiv was about to order Rebis to do something, but then the Amalgamated Pathbearer burst into motion. 

A loud ring of clashing metal sounded, and Daughter cried out in frustrated surprise. One of her bodies tumbled past, split into many parts. Blackness trailed out from her, but the blackness itself was severed, shredded with that radiant mana that infused Rebis's form.

“NO! The vessel! Why! Why is he here!”

“He can’t be! Must be returned! You cannot be allowed to escape! You are Enoch’s toy!”

The Daughter screeched at Rebis from beyond the gap, and more of the Ascendant flooded in. Rebis was moving faster than Shiv could see, and a clash between blurring light and impossibly fast shadows began.

"Right, you got this," Shiv said, slightly awestruck at Rebis's Awareness and Speed. He continued draining, focusing all his power on ripping the veil of existence wide open. 

The last time he sundered reality badly, a phoenix slipped through, and a phoenix might just be what Shiv needed right now. With its radiating presence, it might be able to fight off the Daughter, and with Shiv's Shapeless Tides, he could keep himself alive in the meantime. However, he would settle for a mana storm, if nothing else. He could dive into that and potentially lose contact with the Daughter in the carnage.

A hiss of something made Shiv flinch to his right. A ringing clash of metal on metal deafened his ears. As he turned, he saw Rebis facing two Daughters. The Amalgamated Pathbearer’s wings were extended, and both Ascendants were impaled. Yet, they bled away into black tar, and embedded on the edges of Rebis’s wings were dying children.

Shiv looked at the faces of the Waifs—at the fear and the tears.

He turned away and tried to keep his Berserk under control. What the Daughter did to the Waifs, how it used the children, was beyond what Shiv could accept. We’ll deal with that later. We have to—

The wall beside Shiv exploded again. The massive Vulteg returned. “NO ONE STOPS URRI! NO ONE!”

Shiv’s eyes widened as he stopped draining from the world’s vitality and intercepted Urri with two outstretched hands. A rush of vectors passed through Shiv as he did, in fact, briefly stop Urri by draining all the Vulteg’s strength. However, the Vulteg just kept crashing forward, and with each passing second, more kinetic energy flooded into Shiv. One influx of striped overflow tides became five, and soon, Shiv found himself on the verge of losing control.

He was promptly sent over that verge as a cold length of metal was plunged deep into his heart. Shiv gave a choked gasp as all the overflow tides he was juggling discharged at once. His body was violently pulled in several directions, and his Orichalcum pillar crumbled. Shiv’s uncontrolled Legendary Skill ripped his body apart. 

He unlatched from his falling corpse and—

Teleported himself back outside the cube before he could be cut down fully. Shiv blinked back to where he placed his temporal anchor.

Only to find himself faced with another problem: Cripple’s broken avatar was accelerating toward him. Oh, come the fuck on, just give me a moment to—

The automaton avatar manifested an incandescent fist. But rather than pointing it at Shiv, he lifted it high, and a wall of burning fists crashed over the Orichalcum surface of the cube Shiv was just in a thunderous clash.

“Deathless,” Cripple said, speaking through his broken avatar. “I wish to have proper words with you. You, and Young Lord Arrow as well.”