IV-5 Descend (II)

The main goal of Project Deathless is multifaceted. It is more than just creating an entity that can make the system choke on its own eternal urge to constantly engender war and strife. An entity that simply won't die no matter what world they find themselves in, no matter how high that world's ambient mana threshold. 

An entity that constantly grows death after death until it exceeds the limits of its world and eventually forces an incursion to occur.

I theorize the eventual and inevitable outcome here to be a World Quest targeting my Deathless. After all, what is a world supposed to do against a threat that is rapidly growing beyond its means to contain.

Should such a thing happen, I will be able to use the Deathless to further my goal of discovering the absolute ceiling of power within the confines of our integrated existence. In my travels I have seen worlds so choked with mana that even our Legends would be regarded as common Pathbearers there. 

But I do not think they are the ceiling, either.

No. I think that we can go even higher we can drive the system to the very brink, and perhaps we will be able to match the system's constant escalation and see if it can be over-strained or taxed to the breaking point. 

Even if this does not occur, I will still be able to use the Deathless to further cultivate my own skills and power while gathering useful data for other associated projects.

The second purpose of Project Deathless however is something born of my personal desires. I lost my mother some years ago. The system took her—-the Great One took her during one of his terrible drams. But the Great One takes, they also remember, and so how dead is she truly? 

How dead is anyone within the eyes of the system. The system that records all, that uses our stories as the fuel of its miracles and infuses us with these evolving powers shaped from the struggles we face and the trials we overcome? And so if a skill is a fragment of a soul and the skill resides in the person, could you perhaps distill enough of a person to see them reborn through incubation within a skill?

Perhaps so. Perhaps Rose Van Erren will be among the first to return from that final end…

-Notes Recovered from Udraal Thann’s Abandoned Lab

IV-5

Descend (II)

Reward: Select a Skill to Evolve to Legendary-Tier.

Shiv didn’t notice the reward notification initially.

It was kind of hard to focus when Marikos was using him as a stick to bludgeon the Tarrasque. The apocalyptic beast was assailed from all sides. As Shiv impacted its skull once more, his Pillar of Orichalcum glanced off, like a metal rod impacting a meter-thick bunker made from titanium. Even so, the blow was hard enough that the Tarrasque turned its head, just enough to expose a slight crack lining its crystalline shell. 

A slight crack that Hawgrave drove the tip of her colossal blade into.

Once more, her greatsword shifted. It became smaller and thinner, and it slipped between the cracks before the Tarrasque's regeneration could kick in. Black blood erupted out from the fissure, and the great beast let out a bellow of absolute agony.

“JUST A LITTLE PRICK!” The Tarrasque cackled with pained laughter.

“What the hells is wrong with you,” Hawgrave shouted back in its face. It reached out and drove a fist against the ground. Marikos shot upward, bearing his shield high. A resounding impact shook the world as he parried a descending gravitational attack.

The Tarrasque growled and pushed down harder. The gravitational waves intensified—but then two snaking ribbons of black lightning speared into its eyes. Blood erupted from massive sockets. The Tarrasque reeled black, blinded. Then, Marikos dropped Shiv down on the monster’s back once more as the other Ascendants unleashed their skills as well.

Waves of flame, force, ice, and more washed past Shiv and hammered the Tarrasque. A massive hand formed from dust pressed down on its body, and it let out a rageful cry.

“GOING TO SHOW YOU—”

They pinned it. Just long enough for a certain special arrow to tear out from a dimensional rift and spear through its body.

The Tarrasque’s flesh ignited once more, and it let out a choked gasp. That very moment, Hawgrave’s sword, Rusty, exploded in size and length. It became 500 meters wide and a kilometer long. The Tarrasque was split in half. But it was already dead, and so the vitality it spent to return was paltry.

But they killed it. That gave Shiv the opportunity to finally rip some more of its vitality away. “Marikos! Plant me in its flesh now!”

Shiv didn't know if the Dragon Knight heard him, or if Marikos was simply responding based on pure instinct, but it worked out regardless. Shiv’s pillar sank deep into the Tarrasque's bloodied carcas. A wet squelch greeted the base of Shiv's pillar as the dragon-knight slide him into oozing organs, and he reached out from his Orichalcum with his Drain Vitality Skill.

Shiv focused. He stopped time, and thought about what Sullain did earlier. He thought about how the Vicar managed to shift Shiv's vitality over into that sheen that lined the world itself.

The Deathless pulled, and faint streams of red lighted up his pillar, infusing him with a dose of life force. But though the warmth rushing into Shiv felt intoxicating, he was still drinking it in at a trickle, suckling water as if a man trying to drink in the sea. This wasn't going to work. Shiv knew that, but he kept trying. He focused on the vitality. He pushed everything else aside. 

The Deathless ignored how his temporal shell shattered after eleven seconds, how the Tarrasque was resurrecting with a flash of white and red. Ignored how the Ascendants were hammering it with powers and skills that made the world shake, shudder, but not break. 

Despite all their power, the Ascendants inflicted little damage upon the world and maximal harm upon the Tarrasque. Yet through it all, their blows barely affected its vitality. It only costed the Tarrasque a sliver of life force for it to resurrect, and that annoyed Shiv the most. 

When Shiv died now, he didn't lose any more vitality due to his Vitaemancy skill. As a Revenant, though, he immediately started bleeding vitality everywhere, started fading from existence. Why and how the Tarrasque managed to skip this inconvenience made Shiv more than a little pissed off. He used that anger to fuel his Drain Vitality Skill. The amount he pulled into his body barely increased. 

But rather than being demoralized, Shiv thought there might be a point to that. This wasn't a matter of power. He was still missing something. Something based in understanding. He needed to adjust the way he was doing things.

Time to try something new.

So Shiv went against his instincts. Instead of pulling vitality from the Tarrasque, he tried to deliver a trickle of Vitality back. Yet he found himself unable to. His threads of Vitae were frozen within his pillar, unable to overpower his Toughness. They quivered around him. And the vitality inside his body began to twist and flow. Shiv's eyes widened. 

He noticed how everyone else seemed to emanate vitality in a faint aura. That was why they seemed like fires to him. But his vitality was fused with his soul, contained within his soul. And now thanks to his Vitaemancy field, it didn't even leak from his soul. But everyone else, they were an imprint. They were radiating life force as if it was heat. Life force spilling over into the world. And the Tarrasque was rather like Shiv. It was like Shiv, a closed system, a silo unto itself. 

But existence wasn't a silo. Or even if it was, it was far wider and grander than Shiv was. And though he couldn't touch the Tarrasque or break off any of his Vitae within its body, the presence of Reality, of the system and all integration embraced Shiv. He existed within its structure, and he was only a part of the totality, as was the Tarrasque. So when Shiv drained the Tarrasque once more, he willed the flow of vitality to avoid him. 

He used his skill to bend the path of the Tarrasque’s lifeforce, curving it from himself into the faint sheen lining reality.

And just as the Tarrasque snarled and reached out to rip at Shiv—who was still staked through its resurrecting body—its vitality shuddered and hemorrhaged. For the first time, Shiv felt his Drain Vitality Skill suffer a strain like never before. When he sapped the Tarrasque to feed himself, to restore his own life force, it was like sipping water through a straw. But as he diverted the currents of the Tarrasque's vitality into the embrace of the integration itself, it was like he was muscling a river aside trying to divert its flow, and Shiv was only barely strong enough to guide it.

A pulsing burst of brilliant red washed over the world, and the Tarrasque shook like animal in the middle of bleeding out.

Drain Vitality 74 > 76

"No, no, away, stop!" the Tarrasque whimpered. It sounded like Shiv, but toward the end, its voice distorted and a faint hint of saline lingered there as well. The Deathless would have flashed a feral smile if he wasn't encased in his own Orichalcum.

The Tarrasque's body shuddered. A rain of incandescent needles punched into its eyes, slipped between its teeth, sank into its joints, and detonated. Part of its skull imploded briefly, but then it reformed, it regenerated, and it launched itself up from Shiv with a burst of gravitational energy. The Deathless heard Marikos cry out as the Tarrasque knocked him aside, as it slipped free from Shiv’s pillar with a wet squelch.

The ground cracked, ash swirled high, forming an obfuscating curtain that masked where the apocalyptic beast fled. But Shiv could still see its life force, and it was dimmer than before. Noticeably dimmer. What's more, Shiv's Drain Vitality skill had also advanced a good two levels from the attempt, and it was then that his building thrill hit an apex as he noticed the reward notification still flashing before his eyes.

Reward: Select a Skill to Evolve to Legendary-Tier.

"Yes," Shiv hissed. "Gods damn finally took goddamn forever." Though it hadn't been that long before, when he first accepted the composer's offered quest, it still felt like a lifetime ago. He changed so much since then, and he was about to change so much more as soon as this fight was done, that was. 

That dampened his thrill a bit, realizing that he couldn't just evolve one of his skills whenever he wanted to, due to the risks posed by Delving. Even so, he had arrived. Shiv was a Legendary Pathbearer now, or someone an inch away from becoming a Low Legend considering he was figuring out the true potential of his Drain Vitality Skill. 

The moment felt surreal. It felt—

"Prismatic Guard," a crisp and deafening voice shook Shiv to his very bones. He heard it inside his skull. He heard it outside with his ears. He heard it absolutely and clearly. He would have heard it even if he was deaf. "March forth and secure Blackedge. Cleanse the town of all non-citizens and deliver aid to those who require it."

A feeling of worry passed through Shiv. Uva. Valor. The orcs. If the Republic was moving on Blackedge, how were they going to respond to the Abyssals? How were they going to handle the people there who needed aid? And what were they going to do if the town just didn’t stop? The Starhawk was pretty determined to reach the Abyss, and he probably wasn’t going to just give up. Not when he was so close.

Shit. That’s going to be a problem too. What about the dragon-knights.

"Also, mind the Dragon Knights." And the crisp voice paused for a moment. A flash of incandescent power was followed by a shriek from the Tarrasque. A flicker of motion shot past the corner of his eyes. "But you can cut the orcs down if you find any present," the speaker finally finished. Shiv's eyes widened ever so slightly. It wasn't good that the Ascendants were planning to kill his orcs, but it also wasn't unexpected. 

Frankly, Shiv expected his orcs would enjoy this too, even if it meant their certain and horrific deaths. Of all the things he had to worry about, they were the least. And that was one of the best things about the orcs. They loved war. They didn’t care about dying. So long as you had an interesting struggle or someone they could hurt and dominate, they were game to the end. He could still hear someone of them cheering and laughing, hounding the Tarrasque alongside him.

Another surge of motion jolted past Shiv’s periphery.

"It comes again," Marikos roared. Then the dragon-knight was moving so fast that Shiv failed to react—failed to notice until Marikos had already driven the deathless against the skull of the Tarrasque once more. A sounding crash shook the world and Shiv focused, making himself even Tougher. 

Despite this, his Heroic-Tier Toughness was beginning to falter. The Tarrasque was practically immune to Hawgrave’s blows and the ascendant's skills barely inflicted superficial damage. The only thing Shiv could impart on the beast now was concussive force, but even so it was enough, enough to stun the Tarrasque, enough to hold it in place—

The Tarrasque unceremoniously slumped dead against Shiv as he struck it. It crashed down upon the ground like a crumbling mountain, displacing even more dust.

A wall of ash was displaced upward, coiling around Shiv, but he noticed something. This Tarrasque that he just killed, that he was just driven against, was devoid of life force. It was empty and cold, which meant that it wasn't the actual Tarrasque at all. The Ascendants couldn't have killed it enough to extinguish the rest of its vitality in that short of a period. Not when their other attacks were only getting skin deep.

Shiv tried to grit his teeth but failed to even move his lips. Something’s really felling wrong right now.

"Aha!" Marikos shouted with glee, swinging, twirling Shiv high in a flourish of triumph. "The beast falls! Victory is ours now!"

"Marikos! Marikos!" Shiv cried as he struggled, but his Pillar of Orichalcum left him pinned in place. He couldn't even twist his neck to look around. "That's not the Tarrasque! That's not the Tarrasque! It’s a decoy corpse! It's still alive! It's..."

But the dragon-knight didn't get Shiv's warning in time. The ground beneath them exploded upward in a geyser of ruin and shrapnel. A massive fissure split the land, and what seemed like an emerging mountain crashed fist-first against the dragon-knight's body. A series of sickening cracks rattled along Marikos's torso, and the legend was wrenched free from Shiv, lifted high up into the air.

Hawgrave tried to respond—only for the Tarrasque to hit her with gravitic backhand. A blast of force tore a pocket in the dense cloud of ash choking the battlefield. The Republic Legend and her blade both yelped and vanished skyward from the impact. And then the Tarrasque swept its hands wide as it unleashed cascading walls of shrapnel toward the Ascendants.

As Shiv fell, he watched the Tarrasque bend Marikos in two directions, and a horrific snap followed. Shiv screamed from inside his pillar, trying to get at the Tarrasque, trying to—

Then the Tarrasque smashed Marikos against Shiv. The Deathless felt a crack form over his pillar, and then things broke inside him as well. He barely noticed. His eyes were locked on Marikos. His body twisted over itself in a nauseating heap. The front side of Mariko's torso was now sprawled against his tail, and as the dragon-knight fell, rivers of blood trailed out from between his teeth and out his very eyes. 

Shiv didn't know if Marikos was slain, if his vitality was merely flickering or fading altogether, and he didn't get to make sure. The moment he extended his mana-hydra to pull away some of Marikos’s wounds, the Tarrasque caught him as well, and Shiv was much easier to break than a Legendary dragon-knight.

"The beast falls," the Tarrasque said, mocking Marikos’s voice. It wrapped its hands around Shiv, but it didn't just use its brute force. Its body came aglow with shuddering tides of Dynamancy, and the Tarrasque's gravitational power was magnified a hundredfold. Shiv tried to go out of context, but the Tarrasque was faster than him. Far faster. 

First, the cracks lining Shiv's Pillar of Orichalcum widened into chasms, and then they shattered altogether. A ragged cry of agony escaped from the Deathless, as he felt the left side of his body get crushed to a bloody paste. 

"Why is it always that side?" Shiv snarled in frustrated misery.

He tensed and waited for another death to follow—prepared to cast himself back across time the moment he resurrected back to Blackedge, leaving the Tarrasque to the Ascendants. But then a cage of black lightning crashed down around the Tarrasque's body, and the tip of its index finger was halted but a scant centimeter away from Shiv's falling form. 

The Tarrasque shrieked with frustration, but its shriek was drowned out as a high and alluring voice began singing once more. Shiv's pain immediately faded. His wounds vanished as the song passed through him, as the song swallowed his agony and left only joy in its wake. That voice was beyond divine. That voice was holy. That voice was everything Shiv wanted and everything he would ever want in this life.

That voice—

Psycho-Cartography: That voice is ripping through your mind and slowly conditioning you into becoming a slave. Remember, the ascendants aren't your allies either. Focus, focus on something else, anything else. Collapse your eardrums.

And Shiv did as his Master-Tier Psychology Skill demanded. His heart screamed as the sweet melody was cut off but the moment it vanished Shiv felt his senses return and he noticed how vulnerable the Tarrasque was. Its eyes were wide and distant and a strangely childlike expression lingered on its face. Through the chaos and carnage Shiv caught sight of a small and slight body and despite his ears being burst a giggle washed through him, the giggle of a child.

"You finally got him held still, Halsur," a young girl said. Her voice washed through Shiv from the inside out and unlike Kathereine whoever this was filled Shiv with a sense of impending dread. "Well looks like it's time for me to play doctor. I want to find out what the insides of a Tarrasque snack look like."

And then Shiv struck the ground. His body left fragile after his Toughness skill broke in several places. His bones tore out from his flesh in compound fractures but he didn't let that stop him for long. He fed his injuries into his Biomancy and they ignited around his field rendered as crystallized spell patterns.

“Alright, I just need—oh, shit!” Shiv gagged as a waterfall of blood smashed into him. A waterfall of blood followed by a plunging shadow. Shiv's eyes widened as the Tarrasque's corpse toppled forward. He wentoutside of context before it could crush him and soon he found himself standing within a wide chasm lining its throat. It was like someone managed to garrote a literal mountain open. How did they get through the crystal and everything else underneath? This cut is clean and deep…

He had no idea how the Ascendants managed to wound the Tarrasque this badly but he wasn't going to complain especially since it gave him the opportunity to continue experimenting with vitality drain. He flung himself deeper into the Tarrasque's wound as he swam through the mess he found himself pressing against a cracked wall of crystal. There was so much blood washing over him that was hard to tell where was what or even which direction he was heading in but he simply needed to make contact and as soon as he did he began funneling the Tarrasque's vitality into existence once more. 

He bent the flow of the Tarrasque's lifeforce and this time he saw in full what it looked like. Instead of all the red rushing into him, it began to swirl atop his palm, and coil around his body. Shiv was a singularity for the vitality, but he wasn’t its ultimate resting place. Instead, he was just a guide now, and he groaned as he continued channeling his power, letting the vitality dance around him in an unending current. 

The vitality flowed constantly, ceaselessly forming a maelstrom of bright red essence that slowly began to dissolve into existence. Every bit of brightness that was drained out from the Tarrasque nourished the world itself, and that faint sheen of vitality layered over everything became ever denser.

***

Veronica flinched back from where she hovered in midair as a massive maelstrom of vitality began to swirl from within the downed Tarrasque.

“What the hells is it doing?” She asked her Ascendant.

“Hm? Oh, well, I don’t know, dear. Do your best.” Kathereine’s words were nonchalant, but Veronica knew her grandmother well enough to know the woman was distracted. A breath of annoyance escaped the councilwoman, and she shaped another spell. 

A dome of Dimensionality emerged over the Tarrasque, but the world itself was beginning to tremble with overflowing vitlaity now. Veronica’s eyes widened as brilliant colors of life force began to turn and turn. In the distance she saw ruptures close. She saw mana storms vanish. The air felt fresher. Reality somehow grew denser and most astonishing of all. Kathereine’s presence grew fainter. 

The other avatars were affected too. Their incandescence was reduced. The divine mana leaking from their bodies hinting at the presence of the Ascendants grew ever muted.

And thus, it was Kathereine’s turn to ask a question. “What is happening? Veronica?” Her voice was a hiss, and her sudden urgency just made Vernoica roll her eyes.

"Who knows, but we’re not sticking around to find out." Veronica waved a hand and with a casual gesture she and the twelve avatars were relocated a full kilometer away from the Tarrasque once more. They blinked back into existence just over Blackedge, standing atop the planar gate Veronica manifested earlier to unleash the Prismatic Guard. In fact, the guard was still spilling beneath them. The top, however, was entirely stable and perfectly suited to bear someone’s weight.

Beside her, Anthony was standing up now. His jaw was hanging wide open, and he staggered out from his bathtub in a hurry, no longer treating this matter like an annoyance. The other avatars and councilmembers were looking around as well.

“I got it! I killed it once!” a girlish voice declared with pride. The Waif danced past Veronica, flicking blood off her crimson-soaked body. Veronica’s right eye twitched as she felt some of that blood splatter against the back of her neck and her hair.

“The beast! Where!" ragged gasps escaped Stormhalt as his head swung from place to place. His flesh was badly charred. What bits of his body weren't burned were now raw red, making him seem like a slab of uncooked meat. His armor was melted as well. 

He had been over-channeling Halsur's power, and now Halsur was looking down upon his avatar in confusion. Black lightning flickered around Stormhalt, but every now and again the electricity would briefly pulse, blue or white, becoming a function of mundane Aeromancy.

As Stormhalt’s breathing calmed, he staggered to the edge of the planar gate they were all standing on and watched how the Tarrasque was drowned in a confluence of twisting bands. Curving gales of vitality were bleeding out from its form and sweeping into reality, dissolving into reality.

“What is it doing?” Stormhalt asked.

“I really hope someone else can ask me that question,” Veronica said through clenched teeth.

“What’s it doing?” The Waif squeaked.

Veronica decided to do the mature thing as she briefly teleported the small girl into a plane filled with clowns. The Waif hated clowns.

With punishment administered and silence restored, everyone just stared as the Tarrasque resurrected and groaned. Hawgrave plunged down through the distance clouds and made a pluming carter in the ground. But no one bothered to stare at her. Instead, all eyes were aglow with Divination and locked on the Tarrasque.

Yet, as Veronica gathered her power, and sifted through the chaos swirling about the Tarrasque and centered her focus on one single thing: the second presence still hidden within its body. The second presence that was the composer of this maelstrom of life. It was that boy she caught sight of earlier, the boy encased in Orichalcum, the boy the dragon was using as a stick to beat the Tarrasque. Vitality was rolling around them him a hurricane, centered around him like a hurricane.

Veronica “Oh,” Veronica breathed, realizing what she was seeing. “He’s doing the Funnel. Wait, who is he? Who are we looking at? Why does he have a Drain Vitality Skill?”

What’s more, she thought she knew the boy.

Veronica triggered her Legendary Memory Skill and dropped into a literal palace made from her own memories as time slowed to a near halt outside. She ran through her own recollections. She studied every single moment she had of that boy and organized them into rooms.

She knew his face. She'd seen that face somewhere before, and suddenly she started walking back some more, following her instincts, using her perfected memory palace to help her uncover this mystery. Doors materialized before her. She walked through rooms containing other memories, other moments from her past, and finally as she turned the knob of a wooden door, she stepped into a small office, a small office with a file on a table. 

She looked down at the file, looked over her younger self's slumped shoulders, and she recalled a report she had read some 18 years back. It was a harrowing report. A tragedy had happened at Blackedge, something beyond reason, something foul and black and nonsensical.

The Eclipsebreakers had turned on themselves, Roland Arrow's trusted companions, Vera and Harlon Lowe, and had enacted a ritual using Rose Van Erren and her unborn daughter. Vera perished during the ritual.

Harlon was slain by Roland without a fight.

She looked down at Harlon’s face, and her gaze lingered for a moment. She had other memories about the man, but she let them go for now. No sense in dwelling on old pain while new miseries lurked on the horizon.

She stepped out of that room and returned to a recent memory just a few seconds ago. It was of the dragon-knight flying through the air, swinging the boy around. Veronica halted time within her mind and regarded the frozen face of that boy encased in Orichalcum. 

As everything stopped moving, Veronica walked across the air and stood across from the subject of her interest to better study him.

“Yeah. He does look like you, Harlon,” she muttered. “You and Vera.” She sighed. The son. The child. The Omenborn that Roland refused to release. Godsdammit. Why did everything have to be so messy and complicated? She wanted to be back at the capital, dealing with feuding nobles. That was at least straightforward. “So what is he doing here?”

"I know. Curious, isn't it?" Katherine suddenly said. Veronica looked to her right, and her grandmother appeared, regarding the boy with a slightly lascivious expression. Veronica cringed.

"Grandmother, come on. Seriously? Seriously, you're going to leer at the boy inside my mind?"

Kathereine rolled her eyes. "Oh, come now. If we cannot leer at people within our own minds, where can we leer at them?"

The councilwoman simply stared at her Ascendant flatly. "Our minds?"

"Yes," Katherine said, briefly patting Veronica on her head. "After all, there's no you without me."

Veronica simply glared at her grandmother quietly before she scoffed. “Okay. Well. At least we know who he is. Now. Other questions: Why does he have Vitality Drain. That’s a Legendary Skill and unless we’re looking at some Legendary grade fuckery—” Her voice trailed off as another memory smashed into her the moment she thought of a certain Legendary Ratfucker who made her like a rat-fucked mess during the war. “--Fucking Udraal Thann godsdammit. Okay. I have a guess.”

“Hm,” Kathereine hummed with pride. “And that’s why you’re the first among equals on the council, dearie. Now. What’s the guess—”

And as if to spill oil upon fire, a quest notification appeared before Veronica’s eyes. It appeared before Kathereine’s eyes as well, considering how she suddenly stopped talking.

Hidden World Quest Activated: Slay Tanner “Shiv” Lowe, the Deathless, before he fully comes into his power and drives your world beyond its current mana stability threshold.

Rewards: Integrated Earth will experience an Ambient Mana Threshold Evolution. Mythic Skill Tier will become available to all Pathbearers within this Ambient Mana Zone. Evolve 10 Skills to Legendary-Tier.

Failure: A specialized Incursion will be triggered to destroy Integrated Earth in 10 years, 6 months, and 5 days.

Both Kathereine and Veronica stared at their notifications. Speechless.

“Grandmother,” Veronica said. “Did you happen to get a hidden world quest, perchance?”

“Perhaps,” Kathereine replied. “And perhaps I am not the only one.”

***

Shiv didn’t even notice that he left his Outside Context Problem state as he continued draining the Tarrasque. He was too enchanted by the churning sphere of vitality dancing upon his right hand, by the vortex that constantly spun around him. A loud and thunderous groan shook Shiv's ears as the Tarrasque resurrected once more. Shiv’s draining was briefly interrupted as the monster’s vitality collapsed inward.

A heartbeat later, a dense wall of tissue healed over Shiv, leaving him pinned in place as if an insect sealed in wax. But he never stopped draining its vitality. He never stopped feeding its life force into integration. Shiv was wrong earlier. The Tarrasque wasn't an ocean. The system was. The world was. The world had a lifeforce of its own just as Shiv, just as the Tarrasque, just as everyone else in Integration.

“Stop. Sucking.” Shiv could hear the Tarrasque groaning, but he didn't. He drained as much vitality as he could, and he relished as he watched its life force go from being like a blazing forest fire to something only comparable to a burning building. "Stop!" the Tarrasque cried out, waves of gravity rushed inward. Shiv didn't get a chance to respond. The crushing force passed through the Tarrasque and splattered him in an instant.

Pillar of Orichalcum 221 > 224

Gravitic Wrestler 171 > 175

Strider of the Unbending Path 151 > 153

Vitaemancy 86 > 89

Outside Context Problem 76 > 82

Vitality Drain 76 > 83

He died and in the same moment he shifted the path of the Tarrasque vitality back to himself and once more his drain went from a flood to a trickle. 

A trickle wouldn't be enough to save him. The Tarrasque's cascading waves of gravity continued to crash inward. They battered Shiv's vitae form, like tsunamis of metal crashing against a house made from clay. Coldness exploded through Shiv in patches, and his insides went into freefall as he felt the telltale chill of oblivion loom. 

But Shiv wasn't going to go into that nothing without a fight. He drained harder, he drained, and he thought once more. He thought about how everyone else's vitality radiated, how they were always bleeding lifeforce into existence.

But I'm not like that, Shiv thought, as he was reduced down to a chunk, then a rope, then a string, and then a knot. I'm not like that. The cold was seeping into his very soul, settling into his very soul. Can I be like that? Shiv thought. He tried to open himself, but he failed. He had no concept of how to do such a thing, and it might be impossible anyway, considering the shape of his soul. 

Yet he wasn't done. He thought about how the world sapped so much vitality from the Tarrasque. He thought about the flood passing into the world. So what if, what if I let the world drain from me? What if I do that while I'm still connected to the Tarrasque? What will happen then? Will… will it just kill me or… No. I have try. It’s death anyway if I don’t.

As he felt that final piece of himself begin to come asunder, he knew there was no more time and no more chances. So he took a final risk and he discovered the true depths of his first Legendary Skill. Vitality rushed from the Tarrasque into Shiv, but he added a third point to the junction. Shiv reached out to that faint red membrane lining everything and he compelled it to take from him, to take from him just as it had taken from the Tarrasque a few seconds ago. 

And the world used Shiv as a channel to drink the Tarrasque hollow.

Drain Vitality 83 > 85

Shiv let out a cry of discomfort as a rush of frigid nothingness swam through him. That frigid nothingness was scattered as a cataclysmic blast of heat ignited his insides. Deathless resurrected in a moment. In less than a second he went from being a knot to a sprawling mass and then a full person once more.

 And he kept draining. He didn't stop draining. He drained and he gave. Pulling from the Tarrasque and giving unto reality. And where Shiv could only pull in a trickle when he only called vitality into himself, Integration was far greedier than he. Even with him serving as a bottleneck, the sheer amount the world drain ever second dwarfed the total vitality residing within Shiv by exponents unimaginable.

A moan of misery sounded from the Tarrasque once more. “Bleeding… my… soul…” It slurred its words. And for the first time Shiv thought he might be able to win this fight. He might be able to bring this thing down. “Let me go!”

"Make me asshole," Shiv growled from inside its body. 

This proved to be the wrong thing to say, as a tentacle blasted through his chest, leaving him impaled. Shiv let out a bark of surprise, but halfway through blood spilled out from his mouth and he found himself dangling limply as the tip of the tentacle turned around to glare at him. 

A concentration of translucent mana began to gather within the tentacle's eye, and Shiv just sighed.

Then he cast himself across space and time, back to Blackedge.

The thrill of his newly master power and a building thrill pounded through him with the beat of his heart. But this wasn’t done. As he blinked back into the Perch, he prepared himself for—

Hidden World Quest Activated: Slay Tanner “Shiv” Lowe, the Deathless, before he fully comes into his power and drives your world beyond its current mana stability threshold.

Rewards: Integrated Earth will experience an Ambient Mana Threshold Evolution. Mythic Skill Tier will become available to all Pathbearers within this Ambient Mana Zone. Evolve 10 Skills to Legendary-Tier.

Failure: A specialized Incursion will be triggered to destroy Integrated Earth in 10 years, 6 months, and 5 days.

Shiv let out a miserable groan as he stomped down on the ground, repeating the action of his temporal echo, and nearly doubled over at this new helping of bullshit. System… what the fuck is wrong with you? Why do you hate me.