III-24 Scouting

It helps to understand the battlefield as a living thing when you are campaigning in a field. Scouts, Assassins, Thieves—these are your diag

It helps to understand the battlefield as a living thing when you are campaigning in a field.

Scouts, Assassins, Thieves—these are your diagnosticians. These are your first resorts. They are the ones you deploy to properly understand the conditions of the battlegrounds, the environment, what is hidden, and what is seen. More importantly, these are the ones you use to detect the pathogens, the diseases that you must treat.

What are the diseases? They are structural abnormalities and functional maladies that prevent you from getting your desired outcome. The battlefield is a living thing, and that living thing is shaped to the nature of your victory. Anything that denies that is a disease.

But this is a clever disease; it is an adaptive disease. It is a disease that is much like you, that understands the nature of conflict. It is a disease that comprehends you the way you understand it, and it will send its own pathogens, mirroring your scouts—your diagnosticians, to identify your structures, to assess you, and to bring you down. And so it becomes a dance of mutual deduction.

First, what do you see of them? What do they see of you? What can you keep hidden? What can they keep hidden? Anything that you show them will be used against you at a later date. They will find a way to adapt to it, to infest it, to turn it against you. And it is your duty to be better at that deep task than they are, to be better at understanding them than they understand themselves. It is this way that the truest victory is ensured.

But do be warned: everything you do, every action you perform, every treatment you administer, the disease will start to learn, and the disease will adapt. You must be more than this, a direct adversary. You must be more than clever. 

You must learn. Always learn. Let your evolution outpace the disease’s mutation.

-Anatomy of a Battlefield, Legend-Surgeon Phillina Washington

III-24

Scouting

The tension never left Shiv; neither did the paranoia. The skies belonged to Roland Arrow, but the horizon? That was anyone's game. As he flung himself again, his gravitic field pulsing wide and splitting the ground beneath him, Shiv strained every one of his senses, keeping an eye out for any incoming attacks.

He was well past the ruins of Old Santabar now. The ground was no longer characterized by curving pits of cracked glass. The Tidewall drew close, but beneath its shadow, there were other mountains, other shapes, and structures. The first buildings of the Lost Angeles ruin appeared behind a series of rolling hills. And just as teleportation anchors, observation posts, and ambush bunkers could be built into mountains, a ruined building could serve much the same purpose without any additional modifications. 

As Shiv dashed higher into the air for a heartbeat, he took a peek at the edge of the Lost Angeles sprawl and frowned. There were many, many buildings to worry about. Many points of attack. He had maybe ten kilometers before he crossed over into the periphery of Lost Angeles. That gave him only a couple of seconds to prepare for what was to come.

His Creeping Void was inactive. It hadn't helped him earlier against the dragons and their riders, not truly. They missed a few times as they fired their Necromantic weapons at him, but the blackened patch that spread out from him always hinted at where he was. And what he suspected was some kind of Divination Skill on the end of the riders allowed them to pinpoint him thereafter. 

He knew Adam had a Divination skill as well that allowed Adam to keep track of him, to keep track of even something like the Recollector. If his enemy had anything like that, Shiv wouldn't be able to avoid them for long. 

Stealth and concealment were potent layers to his survivability, but it wasn't a surprise that a proper army had ways to penetrate it.

So he flew low and he detonated his sheath regularly. He didn't go as fast as he could because it made turning hard, and right now he might need more maneuverability than just speed. But he didn't render his inertial sheath inactive altogether. He needed the Reflexes. 

Since he emerged from the surface gateway, he spent practically every passing second under attack. Under attack by Necromantic arrows, under attack by Necromantic spells, under attack by Necrotechs specializing in Necromancy—specializing in the very thing that would make Shiv go off like a bomb.

Then, there was Roland Arrow who didn't need Necromancy to resolve Shiv's existence. Who apparently had infinite arrows hiding just beyond the clouds, waiting to crash down at any moment to glass an entire section of the land. 

"What is this bullshit?" Shiv grumbled to himself. Roland Arrow was powerful, more powerful than practically anyone Shiv had ever met. Shiv had thought Sir Marikos to be absurdly potent, vaporizing a mountain with a single Pyromancy spell. Roland Arrow could do that without even being present. 

The man was in Blackedge and was still around fifty kilometers away. Shiv was closing fast—the Deathless moved fast now, even at the low end of his acceleration, but Roland's arrows reached him near instantly. They crossed over from the void in a scant second. Shiv had to spike his Overdrive to a fatal point just to track the arrows’ movements. 

The only thing I really have to counter him, Shiv thought, was my Outside Context Problem Skill. I can't use that without draining someone after.

As Shiv continued on, his thoughts briefly drifted as he saw something in the dark. It was a massive, rusted shape sticking out from the Tidewall. The uprooted continental plate rose high like a mountain of mountains, but where it seemed flat and square on the side that faced the Grand Pacific, the part of it pointing toward the land, toward Lost Angeles itself, was jagged with rock and embedded with pieces of metal. Not just pieces of metal, but structures. They looked like jutting towers, buildings, metallic bones sticking out from dense clumps of stone and soil. There were also vines, patches of vegetation in between, and at the very center, there was a large dome-shaped thing.

Shiv didn't recognize what it was for a moment, but as he observed it, he realized the dome-shaped object had a large, cracked glass eye. It had limbs sticking out from it, limbs that swayed and dangled. It had a drill attached to one of those limbs, or something that looked like a drill at least. Instinct guided Shiv's understanding. This thing had been an automaton, or maybe just a large and complicated machine. 

But it didn't resemble any automaton or large machine Shiv knew. Most bots today weren't that big—weren't anything close to that size. They needed to advance their skills to do something like that, to evolve mechanically. The system wouldn't accept it otherwise. So that only meant one thing: the machine he was looking at probably predated the system by a long, long time.

"Who the hells were we?" Shiv wondered. His paranoia was still there, but his curiosity was kindled as well. For all the years he spent hunting vampires in the Lost Angeles ruin, scouring the wrecks and husks of old buildings, finding magazines for some customs agents, he always had a feeling he was walking in the shadow of ghosts greater than anything he could ever fathom. 

Talking with Can Hu only increased the feeling. And now, now an urge came over him… An urge to discover who humanity was, how they achieved such creations even without the aid of the system, and why they were building machines so deep, machines embedded in the foundations of the continents themselves. 

"Who are we?" Shiv asked himself again.

His question was interrupted as he noticed a shimmer on the horizon. Over a series of verdant hills, there was a patch of quivering light. His increased Shadowsense, granted thanks to his improved cape, let him notice the discrepancy. Just then, one of Roland's arrows quickly started circling above as well. Where once those gleaming needles incinerated Shiv and cast him into death, now they highlighted oncoming threats. Oncoming threats that Shiv adapted to immediately. 

He expected this. It was either another dragon patrol team or perhaps something even worse. Whatever it was, Shiv didn't intend to stick around and fight it. Move, evade, scout, lure out more adversaries, and reach Blackedge—those were his goals right now. 

That would help Adam the most, or let them understand the composition of their enemies, the layout of the geography, and plan their coming operations to aid Blackedge.

But he didn't need to do this stupidly. His fight with the dragons had taught him a few things. 

First, Divination wasn't perfect. Even if they could eventually pinpoint his location, jumping between his sky splitter and his strider quickly threw them off, at least for a while. Also, casting out his old corpses worked. Usually, someone was looking for something to shoot at, and if he gave them a reason, they would respond to it. 

His old bodies were a perfect supplement for his stealth capabilities and formed the foundations of his new strategy. He was more than a brute. He could be tricky, cunning, deceitful. The deception skill he gained was a message from the system, another part of his overall skill set taking shape. 

They're coming for me, so I might as well give them something to attack. Something that will pull them out of position and show their defensive and offensive capabilities, he thought.

He accelerated suddenly, blasting across the land as he pulled on his gravitic field twenty times. The ground split apart beneath him. The air flickered as the first embers of combustion danced around his body. A contrail of heat and force followed behind him. And just then, he saw a flash, a flash of corrosive green pulsing just over one of the hills. Shiv grinned. "Here we go." 

He stopped time. He charged his gravitic field another thirty times more. His body snapped. His ribs folded inward. Some of his organs were drawn down into his pelvis. The prolapse was painful, but it was also useful. He had chucked out a body from his cape, launching the corpse straight into the ground.

At the same time, he detonated his inertial sheath, discharging all the kinetic energy he had and flinging the body even harder against the parting soil. It was like someone was pressing a massive boulder into sand. A smooth curve carved grooves into the earth, and his corpse was pressed deeper and deeper still.

But then Shiv reverted time. He returned to where he was a few seconds ago, before he accrued all his wounds, before he suffered so much damage. He took another route, and as he did, he threw his knife as far as he could, watching it sail into the horizon. The first crack spread across his temporal shell. He let time resume, and a series of blasts followed, blasts that cleaved at the horizon and shook the air where he had been before he stopped time.

Immediately, jet streams of Necromancy struck the ground. It cleaved the space he was in apart as screams of corrosive energy filled the air. Screens of festering decay expanded, and from them, a swelling tide of green, boiling mana swallowed patches of the world.

It was all absolutely wasted.

The Necrotechs missed him by a good 400 meters as he accelerated in a new direction for a few seconds—then teleported to his knife. A few seconds later, the second patch he was at vanished in a storm wave of Necromancy mana as well. 

"Keep moving," Shiv muttered to himself. "Always keep moving."

He stayed as low as he could, but even at his controlled speeds, the ground was being ripped apart. Grass was practically being flayed out from the soil—and then grass was replaced by debris and dust as Shiv entered Lost Angeles.

Shiv counted the seconds, but then he triggered his Outside Context Problem as well. Another spike of cold entered him. He wouldn't be able to do this again until he drained some vitality. That was fine. He exploited this moment to go a bit faster and to throw his knife once more, arcing it over the horizon. He watched it spear through the air and sail past a series of half-collapsed structures, their bones sticking out from the ground like broken incisors. 

The Necrotechs might be hiding among those ruins, probably were hiding among those ruins, but they wouldn't be expecting Shiv to suddenly appear there. He teleported, and as he did, the world was calm, but his Biomancy revealed more truth than the eye could see. There were dozens of life forms around him, dozens that weren't vermin. They were human, or human-like, and they were scattered all around, hidden inside the structures. A few posted against the windows, some nested even deeper. 

Shiv considered stopping for a moment to drain some of their vitality, but he didn't.

Instead, as soon as he dropped his outside-context problem, he resumed his Chronomancy and he accelerated forward. The same strategy as before. He accelerated sixty times, dashing over and over again until his body was practically coming apart. Then he discharged his kinetic energy. 

A bomb went off: a time-frozen bomb set to devastate an entire section of the ruined city. But just then, he reverted time once more, time back to where he had been five seconds ago. His temporal shell cracked again. He let the present return. 

Time resumed. Shiv took a new route that arced off at an angle, and he continued along that path, discharging his inertial sheath at the same time that the previous inertial discharged spread across the outer section of Lost Angeles. 

The blasts came seconds apart for him, but to the Necrotechs, it must’ve seemed like a series of mana bombs were going off at the same time. If he was lucky, they would even think artillery was falling from the sky.

Deception 1 > 3

A massive sphere of destruction spread out kilometer by kilometer, ripping the outer section of the ruined city apart. Buildings vanished. Streets shattered. But not six hundred meters away, a smaller detonation happened at the same time. Shiv smirked as he felt his Deception level. He threw his knife and teleported again, blinking to where his knife was. 

He reappeared deeper within the megacity, and behind him, a hailstorm of Necromancy crash down, splashing down where his inertial discharges ballooned outward.

Shiv chucked out one of his corpses just to confuse them more.

A hailstorm that left a trail. He narrowed his eyes and saw it arcing from the distance, right over the horizon. But that wasn't the only source of the attacks. There were portals opening up in the air as well, Dimensional rifts that pulsed open in the skies above to unleash a torrent of elemental destruction and other skills. 

Dimensionals flooded out from those torrents right after. Dimensionals of air, near invisible aside from their vaporous forms and their gleaming white eyes. Dimensionals of flame that soared through the sky like missiles, their bodies spiral-shaped, their arms numerous and infused with magma. But more than Dimensionals, there were other creatures supporting their effort—monsters made of so many superimposed mouths, layered within other mouths, that 

Shiv's mind twisted upon seeing them. "Eldritch," he realized. "God damn it, can't seem to get away from those Outsider shits."

Shiv ignored them. He continued on, deeper into the city. He ignored walls as he sped forth, smashing through buildings. Debris peeled around him; plaster, plastic, glass, and concrete exploded off of his armor. Then came the first splash of something wet: blood. Red painted the metallic white of his bone armor, and he knew he'd just killed a Necrotech—another unfortunate bastard pasted for nothing more than being in Shiv’s way. 

But as soon as he killed them, he halted time. He threw his knife again, but not forward—to his left. He teleported to it instantly, changing his strategy. Shiv didn't know how Divination worked, but randomness clearly threw it off. As he blinked to where his knife was, he spiked himself 70 times, nearly died, discharged his kinetic energy in place, then reverted time two seconds before. 

He reappeared in the building, and he dove straight down. As he did, he chucked out another corpse, launching it high into the air. He impacted the earth before his temporal shell cracked. Time resumed.

And the blasts unleashed by his prior inertial discharges surged toward Shiv.

Strider of the Unbending Path 128 > 129

Deception 3 > 6

Tsunamis of heat and force crashed forth. But this was about to be part of Shiv’s strategy too. Let’s see if I can pull this trick off…

He planted himself in place and increased the size of his Skyslitter. It grew a hundred meters, and he slammed its flat side against the oncoming blasts before they could reach him. Shiv’s boots sank into the ground. Concrete cracked around his feet. He snarled as he drove his gravitic field against the blast. But he wasn’t trying to overpower the discharges—he was trying to redirect them. He angled his blade off by the side. His block turned to a parry. Frictionless Vector activated, and he diverted the blast toward where the bulk of the dimensionals were descending in the air. An avalanche of shattering devastation cleaved through a series of half-collapsed skyscrapers, and Shiv spiked himself beside the crawling tide of ruin, using it as cover.

Frictionless Vector 61 > 62

He had been considering such a combo before, but he didn't know if it was possible. Now he did. Definitely going to do that again.

Chaos unfolded. 

The weaker dimensionals simply vanished. The flame dimensionals were extinguished. The air dimensionals parted into fading mist. The eldritch beings splattered apart but quickly began to reform. Shiv didn't want to deal with that nonsense now. The Outsiders were stunned, and that was all he needed. 

What was better was how one of his old corpse sailed through the air, tumbling over and over again. In an instant, he watched as a dozen corrosive arrows smashed into it, blowing apart its body. That made his bone armor decay and wither. Then came a true flood of other attacks. He watched the body ignited with gold mana. 

Someone was using Chronomancy on the corpse, pinning it in place, as a series of elemental cataclysms poured down upon it as a dimensional rift opened behind. A flood of flame came first, then a massive anvil shaped from water. Electricity flowed through the water, and then fire returned again, turning the water into steam. This was followed by a massive hammer shaped from Dynamancy, from the power of gravity itself. It smashed the broken, mutilated corpse apart, driving it deep into the ground and devastating the world around Shiv for leagues.

As he shot a brief glance upward, Shiv noticed something curious. Three large airships with rings at their core’s trailed over the sprawl’s airspace. Within those round circles were shimmering portals of Dimensionalit mana.

As the last of the elemental cataclysms faded, Shiv watched as the portals continued to shiver—were still active. Those must be the dimensional ships Adam talked about. He captured one, but he didn’t say anything about knowing what’s on the other side. I could take a peek myself. No risk for me. I can root myself to the present. Revert time to where I am. Leave my knife here too…

And it suited his current strategy of confusion and deception. Yeah. Why not. Let’s keep them guessing.

Chaos was his ally. His enemies were quick to respond, their Divination was potent, it wasn't perfect. It was confused by randomness. And even with all the Necromancy and firepower they had—enough to probably kill Shiv even with his Adamantine Adaption—they couldn’t kill what they couldn’t hit. 

Predictability was a death sentence, and if he gave his enemies time to set up their strategies, he would be facing invisible arrows—facing all manner of spells and skills he had no experience with. That couldn’t happen. Everything he did needed to pivot into an attack.

Intellectual offense is defense, Shiv realized.

Philosophy 4 > 5

He  froze time and blasted up into the air toward one of the portal ships. A kilometer in the distance, he saw gold-layered figures. Enemy Chronos…

Most of them were eldritch, but there was a squadron of dragons with them as well. Shiv ignored them and accelerated. He had Chameleon active; he triggered his Minor Illusion and threw out a corpse as well. A mirage version of himself blinked into space some two kilometers away. 

The dragons responded immediately, firing lances of Necromantic energy. The beams cleaved through the mirage and consumed his actual corpse. Then, as they figured out the Minor Illusion, they turned all their beams on his corpse.

The poor fools must’ve thought they actually hit him.

Deception 6 > 8

Just before he passed through the dimensional ship, Shiv imprinted a temporal anchor where he was and threw his knife off into the distance. Should be enough as insurance, he thought as he vanished inside the dimensional rift.

A squeezing sensation passed over his body as he felt himself travel through distorted spaces. The transition took another second. Cracks spread around his Chronomantic armor, but Shiv guessed he still had around six seconds. 

When he emerged, he found himself inside what looked to be a brightly lit hangar. For a moment, he thought himself inside the dimensional ship, but with how wide everything was and how there were windows on the ceiling that uncannily showed a bright and resplendent courtyard, Shiv realized he was in another place altogether.

Through a massive set of doors, Necrotechs soldiers, psionically-leashed primal dragons, lesser vampires, dimensionals, and more were gathered in different formations. The fastest among them noticed something was wrong. But their ability to respond was crippled as Shiv unleashed a flood of Creeping Void and dashed toward the center of the room.

Then, something struck him. A rippling wave of gold smashed against his temporal shell. His armor cracked, nearly breaking off of him entirely.

Wards! Shiv realized. There were Chronomancy wards here. Like in the leviathan. 

Another wave shot towards him. Shiv cursed—He spiked his Inertial Overdrive to the limit. As he got to 50 spikes, blood vessels burst in the back of his head, and he triggered his Song of the Vigilant so that he could actually finish the spell before dying of an aneurysm. He discharged his kinetic energy. The room shattered apart. As did almost everything around Shiv. The dragons were blasted back without severe harm—as were some of the stronger Pathbearers, however.

Being Plaguefueled made a staggering difference.

Adamantine Adaption 163 > 164

He reverted time. His temporal armor shattered. He reappeared right underneath the dimensional ship and caught onto it. He twisted himself above it using his gravity field, and before he could fully gather his bearings, a tide of force slammed into him. 

Shiv was launched forward into the ship so hard he caused its outer shell to fold inward. He tried to respond to the attack—then he realized that it wasn't an attack. It was simply the blast wave from another of his earlier inertial discharges. 

Shiv grunted. Chronomancy made things pretty messy even for him.

He teleported to his blade and abandoned the ship to its fate. Once more, he teleported across the world, and found himself crashing through the ruins of Lost Angeles again. His speed climbed, his blade was back in his hand, and he was blasting through another series of buildings, accelerating forward as the air combusted around him. 

A massive spread of corrosive energy crawled across the sky above. It was a larger Necromantic explosion than Shiv had expected. But then, it kept going, and then droplets started descending like a waterfall… and Shiv’s stomach went empty in horror as he realized it actually was a massive waterfall; the corrosion took on the qualities of heavy rain. 

"Shit, shit, shit," Shiv snarled to himself. He detonated his sheath again, and he dove inside a building before the first droplets could hit. Outside, needle-thin droplets of Necromantic energy tore pieces through the building, stripping chunks of matter and leaving channels of rot lining everything they ate through.

In seconds, the building Shiv hid in began to dissolve. Every droplet of Necromancy left its mark, and soon holes began to appear all around Shiv, holes above, holes around. He spiked himself ten more times just to get his reflexes fast enough to avoid the droplets.

What saved him more, however, was his Hydromancy. He could feel them coming, feel the hydromantic mana infused in the magic. He didn't realize Necromancy could be mixed with Hydromancy this way, but still, there was enough Hydromancy left for him to push the smaller droplets aside. 

Shiv tried shaping something of a water-displacing shroud around himself, but he didn't know how; he didn't have nearly enough practice with Hydromancy. So Shiv went down. He plunged into the ground and tore through the earth. 

This was the most surefire way to avoid—he crashed head-first into something hard. Something he couldn’t just muscle through. Shiv cried out as he felt his body jolt still. Around him, the earth solidified. It turned from soil and rock to something far harder, something of a similar hue to his own body: adamantine. 

The alchemization happened in an instant. It spread all around Shiv, and immediately it began closing on him, crushing him. He felt something seize his armor as well, pressing at it, but not fully controlling it. A wave of energy made the ground around him tremble. He realized that he was in the grasp of a Geomancer. 

Shiv pushed back with his gravity field, but he couldn't stay here. If they kept him pinned for any longer, they would find him and they'd kill him. With Necromancy or something else, he couldn't risk the Outside Context Problem—not enough vitality. Even if a Necromantic spell hit him, he had a chance of coming out of that simply with an enduring injury rather than a certain death. 

But with how cold he felt, he didn’t like his odds.

Another second passed. The adamantine walls crashed down on him tighter. Shiv cursed as he actually felt the grinding pressure. Shit. The hells with this. He activated his Chronomancy. His temporal shell hadn't fully regenerated, but it was more than a little intact. Without a good choice, he reverted time to a second ago, to where he was still above ground. He reappeared inside the structure only to find it entirely dissolved. 

His mouth dropped open in horror as he found himself trapped under a canopy of falling rain, with a downpour of Necromantic fluid gliding through the air like a shower. He was right in the middle of it. It was this or being held in stasis underground. 

There wasn't any way he was going to be able to avoid that much rain, and he didn't have that much time either. His armor was breaking apart again already. It hadn't regenerated, and he strained it once more with his temporal reversion. So he got up to an old trick. He threw his knife out, doing his best to aim its trajectory. He avoided most of the rain, and it sped out, shooting through another building and continuing onward. 

Shiv teleported, and just as he reappeared holding his knife, his temporal shell approached its limit. He dismissed it before it could crack, and he continued on. He smashed through another building and chucked another body behind him. No more time for subtlety. No more time for anything. 

"Second layer of stealth, let's go." He activated his Creeping Void. Blackness spilled out around him, consuming an entire section of Lost Angeles. 

He spiked his field up to forty times, and he felt the initial harm of inertial overdrive befall his body. His skin tore. His muscles ruptured. His bones fractured. But as he blasted through structure after structure, he was moving fast, faster than he had been moving overall. 

He traveled kilometers in a few passing seconds, and the surrounding city dissolved into anarchy and disarray. All manner of spells slammed down around him, bombarding the positions he used to be at. His strategy of confusion and rapid, random movements worked. They attacked all the strange positions he once occupied; some were still even striking far beyond the horizon at the point of the Tidewall. 

But there were more than just a few observation posts in the city, and soon Shiv felt something, a cloud of Dimensionality swirling around him, condensing around his body. "Shit," Shiv hissed. "That is not good. Not good." 

He had been detected by a Jump Mage or Dimensionalist, one that—

Shiv's thoughts didn't even manage to finish before he was teleported. Someone forcibly wrenched him across space itself.

Pressure squeezed around Shiv. His eyes widened. A rush of corrosive mana blasted toward him. He reverted time to counter the spatial magic. He reappeared where he was a second ago, at the cost of his shell. His Strider shattered. Time resumed in a jolting instant. 

Nearby, a pocket of shadowy distortions collapsed inward like an implosion, and Shiv continued on, but once more the particulates solidified around him. Something whispered over his head, barely missing him. It was blind luck that spared his life that time. 

A Necromantic arrow appeared a meter to his right. It was flung off course by his sheer acceleration, but its tip glistened with corrosive energy. If that had hit…

Necromancy left permanent wounds, and Shiv didn't know how many permanent wounds he could take before he simply entered a cycle of death after death. More importantly, however, he didn't have much vitality left at all if he died now.

Suddenly, the dimensionality burst apart around Shiv, popping as if in a bubble of darkness. Shiv blinked. He didn't know what just happened, but he threw his dagger out again. It punched through a building. He teleported. He threw it again. He teleported. He threw it again. He teleported. 

Shiv repeated this over and over, trying to keep his movements random, ejecting bodies from his cape to leave a false trail. As he emerged from the crumbling walls of a building, he saw the true sprawl of Lost Angeles rushing beneath him. Skyscrapers rose. Broken highways greeted him. Blocks and blocks of rusted, cracked, and decaying structures rolled under him as hills once did. But a section of the city rose. It rose like a climbing pyre, a pyre that sailed high into the sky, becoming a pillar of purest white. And then an envelope of flame spread out, a flame so bright it seared at Shiv's very eyes to behold. 

He hissed and looked away, and he realized what this was. Roland had helped him. Roland had sent one of his arrows down to devastate the area. A shockwave of force followed, and this was but one arrow. One arrow exceeded the entire destructive yield even the strongest of Shiv's inertial discharges.

"I'm gonna need a lot more levels before I can match that," Shiv whispered. But then he realized no one was attacking him either. He stopped his Creeping Void, released another body, and descended. He flew low to the ground with Chameleon active, with Minor Illusion projected, and he flung his knife again, teleporting to it. 

Shiv did his best not to crash into any buildings. He didn't want anyone to spot him just yet. But for now, it seemed like he was in the clea—

Something exploded out of the ground below and smashed into his chest. Shiv found himself dragged high up into the sky. Shiv grunted as a massive hand closed over his head. He gripped the hand and he twisted. He pulled his field—tried to break the fingers holding him. The hand released, and something blasted against his helmet, cracking it slightly. 

Shiv twisted back and soaked the moment of the impact. At the same time, he threw his blade out and teleported to it.

Marksmanship 11 > 12 

As he turned himself in the air, as he used his gravity field to pull against the direction he was flung, he tried to find his adversary. And in the distance, just over a wall of standing mega-buildings, over a swath of brutally glassed craters, he saw Blackedge hanging in the sky. 

Blackedge veiled by circling spheres of interweaving spells. Blackedge bombarded by artillery and magic. 

Blackedge surrounded by monstrosities and nightmares. 

And around Blackedge fell a constant rain of destructive fire, beams of light, rolling arrows christening the ground with purifying flame. And from the chasm flooded an endless tide of nightmarish horrors, dimensionals, and more. 

Shiv saw another shape then, moving in the moonlight. Hovering over Blackedge with the broken moon as a backdrop, was a large skeletal serpent that wove a series of magical shapes between each of his hands.

But then Shiv couldn't focus on them anymore because someone else rose before him, standing on a metallic platform. That someone was grinning at Shiv. 

A breath of exasperation escaped the Deathless. "Fuck me… Of course it's one of you. I was wondering how you bastards keep finding me so fast. You always know where I am…” 

The enemy Pathbearer was huge, three meters tall, with both arms folded behind his back. A small armory of weapons hovered behind him, shaped from liquid metal, and the platform at his feet was an enormous slab of adamantine. More importantly, it was an enormous slab of adamantine that had a series of spell crystals embedded underneath. A magical-booster.

The spellcaster wasn't a human. It wasn't an automaton. It wasn't an elf or an Umbral, or even a Vulteg. No, it was the race Shiv hated the most. A massive orc wearing a full set of dense adamantine-crystal armor greeted him. The orc had his helmet’s faceplate lifted, and his ugly, green-gray skin showed as a small patch between the metallic white. His eyes were of a slightly brighter yellow than that of 811's, but that cruel smile, that strange, perceptive gaze was just the same.

"You should know that this would eventually happen," the orc said. His voice was higher than 811's. It was nasally, too. "You have been cursed and blessed by the Challenger. You cannot evade us, Deathless. Stand and fight. Give me a taste of what I am due.”

Shiv clenched his Skysplitter tighter as he scoffed. "Yeah, well, I got a question for you."

"And what's that?" the orc asked.

"You got a Chronomancy skill?"

The orc frowned. "I..."

Shiv paused time.