III-59 Trap

I know it’s loud, son. The world is loud. The world… it screams. It sings. It calls to us. And it's bright, too. And you haven’t even learned what taste can do to you. What you experienced earlier is called a migraine, Adam. You’re going to experience it again when the noises and sights become too much. But you’ll get better at focusing on what matters and tuning the rest out.

You will. Bit by bit. But what is important is that you struggle now. When I can still help you. Where there are people that can still comfort you. Build yourself now among those who care for you, so you can stand alone against a world that doesn’t.

Now. Pull your hands away from your eyes and try again. It will hurt. But I will be here. I will always be here for you.

-Roland Arrow to Adam Arrow

III-59

Trap

“It’s like walking around with bombs going off in my eyes and ears. In my skull, too.” Shiv grumbled to himself as he lobbed himself through the air. He was hunting for the orc Psychomancers and the Amnesiac in particular. So far, Helix’s claims about the Voidmantid’s Awareness-boosting enchantments helping Shiv with his hunt were turning out to be bull and shit. There were felling bunkers and trenches everywhere, and anything that moved pulled at Shiv’s eyes like a magnet.

In fact, he was extra sensitive to movements now. With the Ocular Compound Network, he didn’t just see further and with more detail, he detected motion abnormally well, to the point he couldn’t ignore literal grains of dust passing through the air. Every time an orc moved in his expanded field of view, it was like someone waving their hand directly over his eyes. And with how many orcs there were in the Tutorial, he was constantly being blasted with stimuli.

But his new eye enchantments were only part of the misery. His Antennal Resonance and Pheromonic Cipher wreaked havoc on his sense of taste—and the orcs tasted nightmarish. Different flavors assailed Shiv’s olfactory senses. His Antennal Resonance had to do with Chemoreception. That basically had to do with someone’s chemical signature. Their scent. No two orcs had the same scent, so the sheer maelstrom of taste Shiv had to gag on was bad enough. Then the Pheromonic Cipher signaled complicated details to Shiv through pheromones, and that was a helping of rotting corpse on top of a shit-crusted pie.

Pair all that with his Magnified Vibrosense, and the slightest tremors in the air sounded like a cluster of mana bombs.

“No idea how I’m going to find the Inquisitors like this. I can barely stop myself from throwing up in this helme—alright, Shiv, enough complaining. Let’s figure this shit out.” He shook his head and focused harder on his senses—tried to narrow in someone that could guide him. His antennae also gave him a sense for True North, but that wasn’t particularly useful for what he needed right now.

He could try dropping into the trenches and asking an orc if they know where any of the surviving Inquisitors are, but he suspected they would just screw with him like the orcs aboard the Court Leviathan.

“You want my advice yet?” Adam asked. The Gate Lord lingered just a few meters behind Shiv.

“Maybe in a bit,” Shiv said, sniffling. He coughed as he tried to get the taste out of his mouth.

“Don’t bother,” Adam said with a slight sigh. “I used to do that too, but it doesn’t work. The taste never really leaves you. You just learn to get used to it. It never really tastes good, but you stop noticing so much when you find something else to focus on.”

“Yeah. Well. I’m having trouble there too. Focusing. It’s like my attention’s getting pulled apart. There’s too much happening all at once.”

“Try to concentrate on a small part of the world. Or maybe just a single sense. Ignore everything else.”

Shiv took Adam’s advice, though it was an uphill battle to do so. The Deathless’s mind jumped from moment to moment, from detail to detail, like it was natural. Uva said his mind was shaped this way for a reason, that he was used to reacting quickly and dealing with many things. That came with drawbacks. But then again, so did these Awareness enchantments.

And Inertial Overdrive, Shiv noted. There were a great many skills that didn’t work so great on their own. They needed to be supplemented. Toughness, Magical Resistance, and Disease Resistance were self-sufficient skills, but they were also utterly reactive and mostly passive. Shiv would go so far as to call them foundational, but there were plenty of people who didn’t level those skills at all.

Multi-Tasking 19 > 20

Multi-Tasking, meanwhile, seemed to be an essential skill for anyone that wished to delve into high complexity magics. Or sort through all their sensory inputs at once.

Alright. Try not to focus on the vibrations and the tastes. Let’s just— And then Shiv’s mind stilled as he caught a whiff of something that wasn’t quite an orc. No. It tasted a bit like him and Adam. Not quite Uva—though she wasn’t that far off. That’s a human flavor. Other humans! That’s why Helix said it was going to be easier.

And Shiv realized there was another part to the whole tracking people down thing: Deductive reasoning. If he had no plan about what to look for, of course he wouldn’t be able to find the Inquisitors.

Awareness 37 > 38

She followed the chemical signals down to a chain of connected crystalline bunkers five hundred meters away. Behind, Adam followed, while Uva, Can Hu, and Valor remained aboard the Court Leviathan to continue “talking about important matters” with Helix.

“Did you find them?” Adam asked.

“I think so,” Shiv said. He had the antennae on his shoulders twitch. “I caught a whiff of the Inquisitors on the wind. I think they’re human, anyway. Smells more like you and me than one of the orcs.”

“Right. Good. You managed to figure that out on your own. You track things based on divergent characteristics. You start broad and narrow down. Habits, pheromones, colors, diet, noises, all these things can help you locate someone easily if they don’t cover their trails well.”

Shiv nodded as he drew closer to the crystalline bunkers. He pulled back on his gravitic field as hard as he could and detonated his sheathe briefly before he slammed down into the trenches. Several orcs called out to him with happy greetings, and Shiv offered a grunt of acknowledgement in response. As Adam landed just behind him, the cheers turned to cheers and muttered insults.

The Gate Lord glared at the orcs. “They’re deliberately trying to start something between us. They give you the hero’s welcome and treat me like garbage.”

“Yep,” Shiv said. “Probably want us to fight each other because of that or something. That, and you’re they’re desired prey.”

Adam did a double-take. “You know, I never understood why. Is it the way I talk? The way I act? Do I seem weak to you?”

“No,” Shiv squeezed past two orcs as he entered a tunnel leading into a bunker. He was still following the smell, and soon it led him through a series of cramped corridors and then deeper underground thereafter. “Well. Maybe a bit. But the first thing is that they’re trying to bother me through you. And another thing is that you’re a Hero. You’re dangerous in a fight, which makes the possibility of facing you exciting. But also, you’re very human.”

“Very human?” Adam asked, not understanding. “And you’re not? Well, beside your monster mind and not-dying thing. Is that it?”

Shiv tried to figure out what his own instincts were telling him. “Not dying is one thing. But it's the fact that I can just put up with their brutality. And you don’t. Right. So, not really human, but humane. You care a lot more than I do. And because they can make you care and bother you, they like attacking you. They’re all assholes, Adam. They’re assholes looking for a sadism hit, and the more uncomfortable they can make someone powerful feel, the greater the dominance. Something like that.”

“Gods, these creatures are wretched,” Adam muttered.

“And don’t you ever forget it, Gate Lord,” an orc called out as he sneered at Adam. 

Then, he spat at the Gate Lord. And Shiv caught sight of something moving within the orc’s phlegm. It looked like a needle. The Deathless halted time and focused his compound vision on the orc’s spit. It didn’t just look like a needle, it was a needle. He stretched his Biomancy field over the tip and a few spell patterns came aglow. He wasn’t sure what it was exactly, but he remembered seeing another spell chain like that somewhere.

It took a moment for it to come back to him. The basilisk venom, Shiv remembered.

Memorization 13 > 14

Shiv plucked the needle out of the time-frozen phlegm and glared at the orc. The large bastard had green veins running along his neck. He also had a glass eye with a crosshair inside. Shiv assimilated the toxins lining the needle and considered using his mana hydra to inject it into the offending orc assassin, but decided against doing that.

But that didn’t mean he was going to spare the orc.

The Deathless drove both thumbs into the orc’s eyes and squeezed hard. The orcs natural eye turned to paste. His glass eye shattered. Shiv’s gravitic field collapsed inward around the orc’s skull. After a brief struggle, the orc’s head turned into a compressed sphere of gore.

There. That should be a good enough warning.

He let time resume. The orc’s skull exploded in a fountain of giblets. Adam dodged to the side—noticing the needle too—but flinched as he caught sight of the dead orcs. The other gray brutes around Shiv let out loud laughs but kept their distance. More fear chains extended from their bodies and flowed into him thereafter.

“What—that—” Adam hopped over the dead orc as Shiv continued down the hall, following the smell. “What in the Ascendants’ mercy was that. He spat something at me.”

“A poisoned needle,” Shiv growled. “Don’t worry. Got rid of it. And then I got rid of him. And this is why I was godsdamned worried about bringing you and the others here. It’s just a matter of time before one of these cunning but low-impulse motherfuckers try something. Probably not going to be the last orc I kill.”

Adam looked around at the other orcs. They just looked on, but didn’t act.

“They’re not going to attack us,” Shiv said. “That’s my gut feeling. This idiot just played his hand hard. And bad. Next time, I’ll felling mutilate his soul and leave him a nugget of scream meat like Band.”

“Why didn’t you do it this time?” Adam breathed.

“Because I’m trying not to lose track of the Inquisitors.”

“They’re a few rooms ahead. We’re heading into an underground prison complex. Or more like a torture ring, judging from all the implements the orcs have set up.” Shiv turned to stare at Adam. “What? Of course I know where we’re going, Shiv. I’ve known since we entered the gate. I’m always checking my surroundings. I just wanted to see how far you could get on your own. More struggle means higher levels—best to only offer the minimal level of help required.”

Sometimes, Shiv needed to be reminded of just how useful having a Heroic-Tier Awareness Skill was.

True to Adam’s word, Shiv soon found himself in what could best be described as a bizarre torture site. A large chamber lined with countless cells and strange implements greeted him. Another peculiarity was how the walls here were made from focus crystal. Shiv looked around, and noticed a few orcs grinning down at him from the walkways above. They all had various Magical Skills. Adept-Tier at the least.

“I changed my mind,” Adam said, glowering at the orcs. “This isn’t a prison or a torture site. It’s a human experimentation facility.”

“Might not be just for humans,” Shiv said. “A lot of these racks I’m seeing are orc-sized.”

The Gate Lord shuddered. The orcs staring at them laughed.

They found the Amnesiac and a cadre of ten orc Pscyhomancers gathered in a larger cell within the chamber. Inside, Shiv bit back a groan as he tasted the scent of infected flesh and loose bowels. As Shiv entered the room, he found the orcs flooding their Psychomancy mana into their prisoners. There were around eight Inquisitors left, and all of them had been stripped bare. Their clothes were nowhere to be seen, but Shiv concentrated on the smell of blood, and found another set of scents nearby.

“What are you monsters doing to these poor bastards now?” Adam sighed. He tried to hide his disgust, and deliberately kept his gaze away from the Inquisitors. Most of the orcs turned and smiled sweetly at him. One continued focusing on the prisoners, and that one, Shiv assumed, was the Amnesiac.

The Amnesiac was slightly short for an orc, but still dwarfed Adam three times over. He wore a vibrant, feathered duster that formed an eye on his back, and he had a small black circle painted at the center of his forehead. “Ah. Insul. Finally. You have deigned to meet me. I am honored. Please, behold our labors.”

The orc gestured at the Inquisitors. Their expressions were blank, their mouths were slack, drool ran down their chins.

“We had them cleaned and properly mended by our Biomancers,” the Amnesiac said. “So that they will be ready for whatever operations we decide to commit them too. A few Inquisitors were disqualified due to innate mental instabilities or lingering magics we could not overcome in the short time we have. We hope you understand.”

Shiv nodded, but he still gave Adam a look. “I think Uva should be here for this, too.”

“Ah. Yes. The Seeker…” the Amnesiac breathed, as if he was anticipating this moment. “Please. Invite her.”

The Deathless froze. He turned a wary gaze on the orc. “What did you just call her?”

“The Seeker,” the Amnesiac repeated. “It is a title I share with her, as well.” The orc tapped his forehead, and the black dot brightened with colors beyond Shiv’s ability to describe.

Adam groaned. “Oh, gods. We chose the orcs specifically to avoid dealing with the Outsiders.”

“The Shapeless Ones are never close. But they are also close.” The orc giggled. “But worry not. I am not a Seeker. I am just a Listener. I hear, and I tell the Challenger things. I tell my fellows things. And I hunt that which shouldn’t be hunted.” The Amnesiac licked his lips. “Dreams taste delightful.”

Just then, Adam fired an arrow through the flesh of existence, and as a dimensional pathway expanded, Uva appeared on the other side. Behind her, Valor had his right hand placed atop Helix’s head. The orc’s beady eyes gleamed with something close to fear as Valor talked about “Skill Plagues” and “Curses that affect even Reincarnators” at length. Can Hu stood beside the orc, glaring up menacingly.

“Adam? Shiv? Something require my attention?” Uva stepped aboard her shield and began drifting across. As soon as her mana strings spilled through the rift, they cracked off the orcs’ Pscyhomancy fields.

“Potent,” one orc Psychomancer chittered.

“Delicate.”

“Hmm. Strings? Haven’t seen this skill before.”

“Puppeteer,” the Amnesiac declared. He fully turned away from the prisoners and stood at the ready, preparing to greet Uva. As she emerged, she regarded each of the orc Psychomancers only briefly, and then turned her magics on the prisoners. She slipped her strands into their minds and rooted about for a moment. The orcs did nothing to stop her. Instead, they all sported eager grins, as if good students awaiting praise.

After a minute, Uva retracted her mana from their minds and regarded the Amnesiac for a beat. “The rewritten memories are sound, but the damage you inflicted on their egos is extreme. They are barely self-aware.”

“Deliberately done,” the Amnesiac said with a bow. “We focused on letting them retain their combat capabilities in case the Insul wishes to waste their lives attacking the Necrotechs.”

“Wasting?” Shiv said.

“Yes. I believe they are best returned to their comrades. To serve as internal saboteurs and the like.” The Amnesiac hummed with joy. “Before you continue with your criticisms, understand that we are not entirely done with our adjustments, and that this is not their configuration. But I also wanted to make a nice suit. In compliment to you.”

“To me,” Uva said. Shiv was watching the orc intently now. He fought the urge to just hack the Amnesiac’s head off. The orc was playing at something with Uva, and Shiv didn’t like it.

“Yes,” the orc Psychomancer breathed. “Your skill… it is a spy’s favored skill. It is the Psychomancy of a spider pluck-pluck-plucking on her string.”

“And yours is that of a Thief,” Uva replied. “You grow stronger by swallowing someone else’s memories. Collector of the Forgotten Pasts, is it?”

The orc nodded joyously. “Indeed. Indeed. Quite well studied. Mind is a very esoteric Skill Evolution. As is yours.”

Uva regarded the Inquisitors once more. “You understand that I will never enter their minds, yes?”

The Amnesiac’s expression flinched. “But why not. Why—”

“I studied what you have done. I know you’ve hidden memories inside other memories. That means you’re very skilled with psychology and Psychomancy. More skilled than I. So. I will not risk myself. I’m not going inside this trap. Let that thought die.”

The smiles on the orc Psychomancers faces turned to frowns. Several of them turned to glare at the Amnesiac. “Was that what you were doing while the rest of us were doing the actual work.”

“You will have to be more subtle to see my skill,” Uva replied. “And I will give you nothing if you provoke me. I care nothing for pride. I see your capabilities and have no interest in playing this dominance game. Pursue it if you must, but I will simply avoid you.”

“I won’t,” Shiv said, his voice rumbling with an undercurrent of violence. “I’m not exactly sure what you guys are doing, but I’m getting the urge to mutilate an orc’s soul again.” And then he noted the eye motif on the orc’s back. “Amnesiac. You had dealings with the Outsiders, yeah?”

Uva’s head snapped to Shiv in alarm. “Does he now?”

“I do,” the Amnesiac said. “I—”

“What’s the Stranger offering you for her life? It is a quest?” Shiv’s guess was as wild as it was blunt. Adam did a double-take. Uva stopped breathing. 

The Amnesiac blinked. Shiv noted how the orc’s facial muscles were twitching. “How… how did—”

The Deathless manifested his temporal shell once more. A faint temporal ward rippled out from the Amnesiac. Shiv shoved it aside with his Magebreaker. He coated his Skysplittered in Vitae and started carving into the orc. He tore and mutilated them in body and soul, snarling like a rabid dog as he brutalized them. When he was done, when the Amnesiac was in tatters inside and out, he leaned close beside the orc’s right ear. “Hey, Stranger. If you’re watching this, find better servants. Maybe one that doesn’t wear a large godsdamn eye as a coat.”

Then, he caved the Amnesiac’s skull in, just as his temporal shell shattered.

Psychology 33 > 34

Awareness 38 > 39

Deepest Edge 66 > 67

Strider of the Unbending Path 137 > 138

The Amnesiac erupted into a burst of bloodied mist. Shiv wrapped himself and his companions with his Aegis of Assimilation, but the other orc Psychomancers and Inquisitors were coated in a deep, dark red.

“Gods—fuck!” Adam flinched. He shot Shiv a terrified stare. “Again?”

“Yeah,” Shiv said, glaring down at the jigsaw puzzle of flesh that remained of the Amnesiac. He held his Vitae-coated blade up to the other orcs, and tried to keep his rage in check—he did so by spending all his anger on his Shape of Monstrosity instead. “Hey. Eyes on me.”

The other Psychomancers obeyed. Fear flowed from them into Shiv. Fear he drank in and relished. Fear he earned with the death of their compromised Maestro.

Shape of Monstrosity 106 > 107

“You guys are done with the prisoners. I don’t want you touching them anymore. What I want you all to do is prepare yourselves for the surface or the Abyss. Your Maestro here’s got connections to an Outsider god. Or whatever the hells the Stranger is. I don’t know if the Challenger cares, but if I catch any hint of Outsider, and they’re not with the Dreamtaker, I’m killing them. I’m mutilating their soul. You understand me.”

The orc Psychomancers turned their eyes down again. Chunks of the Amnesiac drifted along a spreading current of blood. Giblets of flesh bounced off the orcs’ feet and against the kneeling Inquisitors’ knees.

“Dominance,” one of them breathed. “No hesitation. How sublime.”

“Glorious aggression,” another orc laughed. “We hear you, Insul. We heed you. But the prisoners—”

“We’ll handle them ourselves.” Shiv gritted his teeth. “I should have handled them myself in the first place. Godsdammit, I can’t believe I let you bastards bribe me—I’m a social godsdamned moron. The next orc that tries to mess with my head and gets caught doing is going to permanently get their arms and legs cut off. I’m going to wear them like a felling pain vest. So I can constantly dump my wounds into them during a fight.”

The Deathless let out a frustrated breath—and felt even more fear rush into his body. Additional chains hardened against him, and he followed them back through the open dimensional pathway. There, on the bridge of the Court Leviathan, the orc Biomancers looked on in rapt fascination. Valor pointed toward Shiv, and Helix swallowed worriedly as he met the Deathless’s gaze.

“Ah, Insul,” Helix coughed. “You understand that it would be exceptionally harder for me to direct your Biomancy studies if I was quote felling pain vest unquote.”

Shiv stared at the orc Biomancer. “It’s part of why you’re not a pain vest yet, Helix. Or dead.”

Helix swallowed. “What’s the other reason.”

“That you actually bribed me instead of doing what Amnesiac just tried. But, Helix.”

“Yes?”

“You threaten to give any of my companions a strange and rare disease, and I’ll match that by giving you strange and rare wounds. I won’t ever kill you though. No. I actually kind like you. And that might not be a good thing.”

And then the Deathless said no more. Instead, he chose to wordlessly glare at all the orcs on the bridge as the rift slowly closed. When they were gone, Shiv saw that the orc Psychomancers were gone, while Adam and Uva regarded him quietly.

The former looked concerned. The latter had a faint hint of lust in her gaze.

“Shiv,” Adam said, warily. “Are you alright?”

“I just had to kill two of these orcs because they did exactly what I was worried about. I pissed and I’m paranoid. Which makes me more pissed.”

“And aggressive,” Uva whispered.

Shiv sighed and rubbed his face. “I should’ve taken the Inquisitors from the orcs. Should’ve done a lot of things. And now we have to worry about orcs being on some other god’s payroll.” He glared up at the ceiling. “You run a loose felling ship, you know that Challenger.”

The orc god didn’t say anything, but Shiv got the feeling the Challenger took this all as entertainment.

I just have to be suspicious of all the orcs all the time, Shiv decided. Was it going to be exhausting? Yes. But it was probably going to level his Multi-Tasking fast too. If I wanted to take it easy, I would’ve just stayed in the kitchen all the time. Nothing for it. No complaining. Let’s deal with the problems.

“Uva. The Inquisitors. What’s wrong with them, exactly? What was Amnesiac trying to do?”

“He basically hollowed them of self-determination. In theory, it should make them easy to manipulate and direct.”

“But he did something to their minds?”

“Yes. Hidden memories inside memories. Very subtly done. But my control of Psychomancy allows me to feel exactly how dense certain memories are. My suspicions were aroused because of that. It seemed like an effective trap for another Psychomancer—especially with how he offered it specifically for my beneift. But how did you know he was serving the Stranger?”

“It was a blind guess,” Shiv said. “But him choosing to wear an eye didn’t help him. That, and mentioning you were a Seeker. Guess he might not be fully aware of what we down between us and the Recollector, maybe. Doesn’t matter. He’s going to be reincarnating in pieces from now on. I kept enough of his brain matter intact, so I think he’ll get to live for a while every time he comes back.”

Adam shuddered. “Gods, Shiv. You could have just killed him.”

“No. The hells with him. And fuck the orc that went for you, too.”

“What?” Uva said. “An orc made an attempt on Adam’s life.”

“Yeah. Cost him a head and a life. We’re going to have to look out for each other a lot more here. Even more than before. The longer we stay here, the more some of them are just going to try something. Different orcs have different impulse controls, but they’re all going to try and hurt us eventually.” Shiv frowned. “It’s just hard to keep that in your head when they start charming you.”

“And the bastards can be charming,” Adam said.

“Yeah,” Shiv sighed. “Especially for me.”

Uva tilted her head and squinted. “I might have an idea on how to improve your Social Skills. At least, your resistance to being influence or charmed by the orcs. But I’ll need to vet him first. Make sure he won’t compromise you himself.”

“Him?” Shiv asked. Adam looked at Uva curiously as well.

“Angelo,” Uva said. “He has a Master-Tier Charm Skill. And ten other Master-Tier Social Skills.”

“Ten?” Shiv gasped. “Broken Moon, I didn’t know he was that powerful.”

“His mental state has left him diminished. But even so, letting your gaze linger on his face for a few seconds is usually enough for you to be compromised to a substantial degree. I suspect he served the role of seducer for the Ophereus Bloodline. And if you learn to resist him, it might make things easier against the orcs as well.”

“You’re willing to let Shiv be seduced by a vampire over and over?” Adam asked incredulously.

“I’m obviously going to stop it before anything occurs,” Uva muttered in annoyance. “But yes: Comparatively, Angelo is far less dangerous than the orcs. Now. Another question is what we are to do with these Inquisitors.”

Shiv frowned at the eight blood-coated Inquisitors. They all just stared on ahead through everything. Uva wasn’t lying, the orcs did a number on them mentally. “Was the Amnesiac really better than you, or were you just saying that to throw him off?”

“When it comes to Psycho-Surgery? Yes?” Uva admitted it without any difficulty. “I suspect things wouldn’t have gone my way in a direct clash either. But his mana field was compact and more than a little unwieldy. Such was why I could feel how much he hid within a single memory, while he remained blissfully ignorant about his own mistake.”

“Great. So. They’re wasted.” Adam bit his lip as he stared at the Inquisitors. “It might be more merciful to finish them off. Bloody hells, can we even trust the orcs to do anything.”

“Sure,” Shiv said. “Fight. It’s not like the Amnesiac wasn’t planning to use the Inquisitors against our enemies. I think I agree with the dead piece of shit: It might be a waste to just throw them at the Necrotechs. Sullain’s already antagonistic toward the Inquisition. What we need is for them to show up and start a fight.”

“And how are we going to do that?” Adam asked. “Their minds are traps and they’re basically vegetables unless Uva fixes them, or we find a reliable group of orc Psychomancers.”

“Or…” Shiv said, grinning to himself. “Maybe we keep them like this. Most of them.”

“What are planning, Shiv? What’s happening in that terrible, violent head of yours?”

Shiv reached into his cape and pulled out his Mask of False Paths.

Adam and Uva both groaned.

“Shiv. Dear.” Uva muttered in discomfort, as if a mother trying to tell her child she wasn’t going to be buying them a present.

“Have you forgotten that you are the worst spy in all Integration—and likely beyond?” Adam hissed.

“Sure. But I can play a brain-damaged torture victim who escaped from the Necrotechs just fine. We can pin all this on Sullain. We just get a bunch of orcs to alter the Inquisitors’ near-term memories. Then, I show up with the other Inquisitors, and we get rescued by Stormhalt. I’ll get taken into camp, I’ll tell them that Sullain has the Animancy Core is about to use it. They’ll rush in and start a fight. We have the orc forces join in, and get an opening to evacuate Blackedge as well while the orcs and Titansbane or whatever fights Sullain.”

Adam still looked uneasy. “But… if things go wrong.”

“I can leave a time anchor in the gate. I’ll just cast myself back if things go to hell. Besides, you guys can come along with me. We can bring a few orcs over as well if we need expendable support. My cape has a dimension inside it.”

Uva considered Shiv’s plan with a hum, but Adam still looked uneasy. “What if I take the mask in your stead?”

“No,” Shiv said. “I’m not risking that.”

“And you don’t have the emotional control for tradecraft either,” Uva added.

“And Shiv does?” Adam hissed.

“He is less likely to murder Stormhalt on a whim.”

“I—I just need to talk with him. I need to understand—”

“This a sentence often said preceding a violent murder, Hero Adam,” Uva insisted. “No. And you are the Gate Lord. You are needed for the continual development of Gate Piety—and for someone to go over critical, strategic decisions. Such as planning the liberation of your town.”

Adam grunted uncomfortably, but nodded. “I still think this is going to turn to shit.”

“It will,” Uva said. “But things ‘going to shit’ is a Shiv specialty. He thrives in nightmarish situations. And I mean that in a complimentary way, dear brute.”

“I know,” Shiv smirked slightly. “And maybe a bit of chaos is what we need right now.”

“Right,” Adam said. “So. We figure out how best to return these Inquisitors to the Stormhalt, provoke Stormhalt into attacking Sullain. We mass the orcs on the surface in anticipation of the two sides clashing, then move to fully liberate and evacuate Blackedge when the battle commences.”

“We should also let some orcs out into the Abyss in the meantime,” Shiv said. “Have them harass the vampires so we don’t end up getting attacked by another army out of nowhere.”

“Right. Well. Fine. We have something of a general direction.” Adam huffed. “Gods, I can’t believe I’m about to let you play at being a spy again.”

Shiv’s face twitched. Then, an evil grin spread across his features. “I mean, what’s the worst that could happen.”

“Godsdammit, Shiv, why did you say that?”

“More deaths. More levels.”

The Gate Lord groaned.