III-8Hunt (III)

Becoming a vampire means immortality, but it is not your immortality alone. Rather, with every lineage core spread, from those who sired vampires before you, to the one that sired you, to the one you will sire, your entire line grows stronger. Your skills collectively advance, and you can gaze through each other. You can draw upon your lesser's power and lend yours in aid to those above and those senior.

This is what the First Blood will tell you, but the First Blood lies. There is not a proper form of immortality, but a parasitic one. It is a hierarchical chain, meant to benefit the ones at the top, and sold to the desperate and the hopeless as a means to escape their predicament. This comes at the cost—for the Vampirism Skill is not only a skill but a curse and a chain.

Understand what a Lineage Core is. Lineage. Bloodline. You are made a vampire by a sire—and short of them being among the First Blooded, they have a sire of their own. Now, this comes with advantages. For as long as your sire lives and the bloodline chain to your First remains unbroken, they will restore you, no matter how ruined your flesh becomes. The blood of the First, likewise, will flow into your body, ensuring you are resistant to disease, to malformation, to biological decay. This is because you will be made a mirror of the First, and short of their destruction or the ruining of your core, you will endure in their image regardless.

But there is a cost to pay for those below. A price of skills and fealty. You cannot disobey a sire. For they control your blood. You cannot overcome your elders. For they hold your destiny. And when they need to draw forth power, they will be allowed to siphon mana from you as you might from cattle or your lessers.

When you become a vampire, the image they sell is of high nobility, free to indulge in all the pleasure and power offered in by the system without fear of a final death.

The truth is that you are but a link in the chain of blood. To be abused by those above because that is their right. And to be abusive to those below, for they will plot to take from you your core…

-Sire and Sired: The Chain of the First Blood

III-8
Hunt (III)

The vampiress was scared. That didn’t stop her from trying to use her Biomancy to flay Shiv alive.

After educating her on the penalties of being a rude idiot and waiting for her head to grow back together beneath his feet, the vampiress’s head regenerated again—just in time to see Shiv crush the Lineage Core he took from another vampire.

She got extremely cooperative after that

Dread Aura 88 > 89

Apparently, the sad vampire she was torturing was called Angelo Franchetti. He used to be part of the Ophereus Bloodline until he somehow managed to murder his sire and take her core for himself. After that, instead of doing what was the normal vampire thing and climbing up the bloodline ladder, he fled. This wouldn’t be an issue in and of itself, but his sire apparently was connected to a great many junior vampires, Angelo somehow managed to achieve something of a “bloodline blockage” for the senior vampires on top of him. This meant the elders were unable to reach out and shape their descendants, and thus an entire generation of Ophereus Bloodline high vampires turned lesser instead.

“That can happen?” Shiv muttered, taken aback. He was working through Odes slowly, but the Ekkihurst was mainly focused on the intricacies of biology rather than specifically on the nature of vampire bodies. The only other stuff Shiv really knew about vampires was how much Uva—and practically every other Umbral in existence—despised them. That, and crushing their cores kills them for good.

“Without the wizened hand of the First, the Highest Blood will sour and spoil in the newspawn,” the vampiress hissed. She glared feral hate at Angelo, who now had his hands over his face. “You… Vermin. Your sire takes you in, makes you someone of note and status, and you betray her. You butcher her. You steal her core.” The vampiress sneered. “Well done. That was rightfully taken. But then—but then, why did you flee? Why did you seal yourself away from the elders.”

Angelo didn’t reply to her. He was still too distraught. She spat a mouthful of blood at him in response. Her eyes snapped back to Shiv, and he felt her expression change. Immediately, her features shifted. She became more feminine. Her lips filled, and her bones cracked and transformed. Immediately, Shiv felt an urge to look at her—to do more with her—come over him. But her Charisma Skill wasn’t nearly as powerful as Angelo’s.

“Powerful Pathbearer,” she let out a husky breath.

“Headless corpse,” Shiv greeted in return.

Her eyes widened. Her jaw dropped. “Wha—”

Shiv’s armored boot crushed her skull in the next instant, beheading her for the third time. Shiv glared down at her twitching body and growled. “See you felling fuck with my mind now.” He cast a few more laceration spells at the other vampires around him to keep them trapped in a regenerative state as well. He had a picture of what was happening, and frankly, he didn’t really care about the vampires overall.

This whole thing didn’t seem like his business from what was told, but the way Angelo sobbed was horrifically human. The poor bastard sounded genuinely broken. Shiv walked away from the quivering body of the vampiress and knelt down in front of Angelo. “Hey. Hey, Angelo.”

The bare-chested vampire stopped weeping for an instant and turned to regard Shiv. His expression was one of wretched despair. Shiv hated seeing that on the vampire’s features, he wanted to—

Shiv looked away and hissed. “Look. Turn off your felling Charisma Skill, alright. I’m not going to kill you. Yet.”

“I’m not using it,” Angelo breathed.

“What?” Shiv said, surprised.

“I’m not using my Charm on you. I’m not.”

“Then why do I feel it pulling at me every time I look at you.”

“It’s just the passive effect,” Angelo muttered under his breath. “I can’t help it. It came with the skill’s evolution to Master-Tier.”

The Deathless blinked. “So… This entire time, you weren’t even using the skill at all?”

“No. Not at all. I won’t use it again. Never again.”

Shiv grunted. “Could’ve fooled me. Listen: was what she said true?”

“Yes,” Angelo admitted readily. He hugged himself and closed his eyes. “I—I did murder my sire. I did take her core. I did all those things. And I just wanted to be left alone after. I just wanted to be my own person again. This was—it was never my choice. I never wanted… I just wanted…”

“Come on,” Shiv said, holding Angelo by the shoulder. He kept the vampire from doubling and collapsing into blood-soaked soil. “Look. I don’t care what you did. I was just surprised you were a vampire too, and that they were trying to hurt you. Never saw that before.”

That got a hollow laugh out of Angelo. “Hurting each other is all the Bloodlines ever do. It’s all vampires ever do.” After a moment, he righted himself and looked at Shiv. “I’m surprised you bothered to speak with us at all. I did not know your kind still held mercy for my kind.”

“My kind?” Shiv asked.

“Necrotechs. You are a Deathstalker, are you not?” Angelo whispered. “You have proven your power. You have broken the others with your Biomancy and might. I will not resist anything you intend to do.” Angelo almost snarled then as his nails dug into himself. “I can never resist anyone anyway. Never. I am just a thing… I can’t stop being a thing…”

And something told Shiv that the vampire was on another level of traumatized altogether. The Deathless regarded the vampire for a moment and stood up. “Yeah. Well. You’re not my thing. I only kind know what’s going on, but frankly, if you hurt the First Blood, that makes me want to cook for you, not kill you. Also, I’m not a Necrotech. I’m just a simple Pathbearer, making my way in the world, looking for a hydra or something that has good natural regeneration.”

Angelo looked up again, an expression of genuine surprise dawning on his exquisite features. “You aren’t—but the armor you wear…”

“Just how I like to dress. It’s convenient for me.” Shiv let out a laugh. “And I don’t think they know death nearly as well as I do.”

“So… you are merely monster hunting? Here? In the Umbral Depths?” Angelo sounded confused and skeptical. “You do know that this is conflicted territory, do you not? Both the First Blood and Compact have laid claim to these lands—and the Compact does not allow unregistered hunters or Pathbearers to poach here, to even walk these lands without a proper license.”

“Yeah, I don’t really care what Compact wants,” Shiv replied. “The First Blood, neither. As far as I’m concerned, both of them are made up of bastards who need killing, and that’s all they are to me. Speaking of which, why the hells are you here, then?”

“I own—I owned a plot of land nearby,” Angelo breathed, a haunted expression returning to him. “I bought it. From the Lords of Law. It was mine. And I was to be safe here. Safe with my people. A town of our own… Just a small… small plot of p-peace.” And then tears spilled forth from Angelo’s eyes again.

Shiv was about to ask him for more details, and then he noticed most of the scar-armored vampires he killed earlier had regenerated. “Gimme a second.” Several laceration spells later, the conversation continued. “Alright. Where’s your place? And tell me what happened exactly.”

Angelo’s tears trailed down his cheeks, but his eyes remained locked to Shiv. “Why? Why do you care?”

“Because there might be other vampires there, and I think it’s best if there weren’t.”

The deserting vampire looked upon Shiv, his face fraught with near-hope and disbelief. “Who are you…”

“I told you earlier. Just a simple Pathbearer. I need to be back somewhere with food in a while, but I think butchering a couple of vampires won’t take up too much of my time. Besides, the system would have forced me into some bullshit sooner or later.”

And somehow, Angelo understood. “You’re a questing favored.”

“Something like that. So. Where’s this town of yours? And what’s its name?”

“Hawthark,” Angelo breathed, a surge of hope filling his gaze. “Hawthark. I—you truly wish to help me?”

“I didn’t say anything about helping you. I’m just in it for the vampire killing. And if there are other innocent people there, it might be best that they get saved.”

Slowly, Angelo rose to his feet, a renewed purpose lifting him. “I—I can show you. It’s not far. But the First Blood. They sent an entire Court Leviathan to recapture me and put my people to the fang.”

Shiv cocked his head. “A Court Leviathan?” Shiv wasn’t fully sure what that was but it sounded like it might be interesting. “Does it regenerate?”

“What?”

“Does it regenerate? Is it edible?”

Hope was usurped by confusion on Angelo’s face. His mouth hung open slightly. “I—yes? Possibly. I’ve never thought of such a thing.”

“Ah. The hell with it. I’ll figure it out after I kill the bloodsuckers and cooking the thing.” A groan came from nearby as several of the other vampires finished regenerating again. “Hm. Nah. I’m not cooking them. Feels too close to cannibalism for me.”

Angelo blinked twice. Shiv ignored the flabbergasted vampire as he dragged his cancer flail over to the vampiress who only just grew her head back. Once more, she blinked, once more, she looked up, once more she saw Shiv. “So. About you trying to seduce me earlier…”

“No! Please! No! Mercy! My sire can—”

She made a fine test subject for the first proper swing of his new cancer flail.

***

Angelo led Shiv through a dense thicket packed with feathery plants. As they continued on, Shiv continued plucking new ingredients to try out later. Even now, with blood dripping from his flail and gore painting his armor, he reminded himself to stay immersed with the world.

Beauty one second, violence the next. That’s your way, isn’t it system?

The rogue vampire moved with terror and caution in his every step. He had some kind of Adept-Tier Stealth Skill that allowed him to dive from shadow to shadow. It was a bit like the Umbral Shadowalker Skill stored within Shiv’s Mask of False Paths, but rather than going invisible, Angelo basically treated shadows like they were pools of water.

Shiv strolled forward casually. He wasn’t going to use his Stealth Skill until Hawthark was in sight. The Creeping Void was awesome at concealment and confusion, but subtle it was not. It was a very Shiv skill in that sense, and for now, he just wanted to get a look at his enemy and the so-called Court Leviathan that carried them into battle.

Once more, Shiv realized the value of possessing a variety of skills. He was hyper-specialized for two things, mainly: combat and cooking. In terms of combat, he had an additional specialization in close quarters, high damage, low precision, mass devastation encounters. He was hard to kill, inflicted a great deal of harm, and more importantly, he kept coming back. But when it came to predicting what his enemy might do, or sensing hidden foes, seeing them over the horizon, that was where he had no capabilities whatsoever.

After fighting alongside Adam and Uva for so long, Shiv suddenly remembered how limited he was alone. If he had Adam with him here, the Young Lord would have simply cast his awareness afar, and through Uva, they would all get a good glimpse of their enemy. If he had Uva, he wouldn't need to interrogate and threaten a vampire for information. She would just pull it out of their memories.

When they fought together, they all shored up each other's weaknesses and made one another exponentially more dangerous. Enemies with massive Physicality and Toughness skills were vulnerable to mind magic or surprise—Uva’s specialty. High Magical Resistance adversaries that Uva couldn't easily get to would be torn apart by Shiv, or shot down from afar by Adam. And what they couldn't notice, what they couldn't easily react to, would be seen by Adam. He would direct them as the hawk in the sky, while Uva was the whisper on the wind and Shiv, the storm fated to fall thereafter.

Now he was a restrained storm, holding himself at bay, creeping through the shrubbery and peering afar over the shoulder of a peculiar vampire to save the rogue bloodsucker's village, town. Shiv spotted the town of Hawthark immediately. 

He and Angelo were at the very top of a slope, still mostly shrouded by feathery plants. Hawthark wasn’t a big town, but it did have a huge building. It seemed to be some kind of church, judging from the religious iconography decorating its surfaces. Its front end was the shape of a massive sloping triangle, and there, a colossal entity with many limbs, a large glowing body, and colorful fractals where its head was supposed to be. 

Flayed bodies were nailed to the face of the town, defiling the religious nature of the architecture.

Nearby, Shiv saw windmills turning, but as they spun, the wheels burned, and his gut clinched as he saw bodies hanging from each of the turning flaps.

"Great One," Angelo whimpered. "I know… I know them. I promised they would be safe here. I invited them here to live… They were desperate. I thought I could offer them something… A life… Hope…”

"Angelo," Shiv said, planting a hand on the heartbroken vampire's shoulder to steady then. "I can’t do anything for them now, but I can still kill the bastards who did this.”

Angelo drew in a long, shuddering breath. "I can. I just… I prefer not to."

"Yeah, well, that’s fine. More levels for me"

Angelo’s eyes widened as he regarded Shiv with a look of disbelief. Shiv studied the other buildings in the town. Most of them were on fire. Several had been reduced to rubble. Blood choked the streets. Blood, viscera, and blood horrors. So, the vampires had to still be around. Either that, or they left some of their minions here for no reason.

Shiv squinted his eyes as he studied the disfigured monsters forged from blood, tissue, teeth, and teratoma. Screams echoed out from one of the buildings, a particularly large one that seemed to be some kind of silo. Shiv had to guess it was meant to store food. Now, well, maybe it was still meant to store food. But food the vampires revered—human livestock.

Angelo was shaking, but he was no longer in a sorrowful state. Instead, he trembled with rage. Shiv didn't look at the vampire's face. That was always a mistake. Even without him trying, Angelo's Master-Tier Charm Skill was distracting at a glance, and potentially full-on compromising if one's gaze truly lingered.

Shiv wondered if the charm skill could be used during combat, and he realized he might have neglected his Silver Tongue skill more than he thought. Maybe not my Silver Tongue Skill, Shiv realized. It was technically more Rose's.

Many things in you and me commingled, the dead Diviner moaned. Where does one begin. Where does the other end?

Once more, Shiv focused his senses.

He didn't go rushing in. Not that he didn't want to just go rushing in. Part of his instincts were already screaming at him to charge through, to use his Inertial Overdrive, and annihilate the Blood Horrors. He knew they couldn't stop him. But he also understood something about how the vampires fought. After facing them at Gate Theborn, the Blood Horrors were chaff, expendable. They buried enemies under their mass of bodies. In some ways, they were practically an army of living meat shields for the vampires to use. For the true Pathbeaerers within the First Blood's forces to spend and wield. Blood Horrors created openings, took up the enemy's attention. All the high vampires, and to some extent, the lesser vampires, were more focused, striking at the most dangerous among the enemy Pathbearers.

Just then, he saw someone emerge from the silo. They held a small body in their grasp, and the Deathless clenched his jaw tight. His eyes bulged. Rage ignited inside him, but Shiv spent it immediately on his Awareness Skill. His vision and hearing improved.

Awareness 12 > 13

Even from this distance, he could tell that it was the corpse of a child. The small body was missing arms and legs, and the one holding him was a tall vampire, dressed in fine robes and loudly proclaiming something to no one in particular. But then something in Shiv's instincts changed. It told him to wait. It told him that there was something there, something he wasn't seeing.

"Why won’t they stop… Why… What is the meaning of any of this!" Angelo hissed. He nearly rushed forward. His fingers turned into thin, sharp-tipped claws, but Shiv reached down. He clutched Angelo by the shoulder, and he held him in place. 

"No. We don’t do this reckless. There are still other people alive. We go at my say.”

Angelo wanted to protest, but he fell silent as his gaze met Shiv's ever so briefly. Where Angelo had master-tier charm, Shiv had Dread Aura. It was an Adept-Tier Skill, but it went a long way in direct moments of persuasion.

About three seconds later, Shiv's patience was rewarded as something emerged, seemingly from thin air. A ripple came first. A massive pulse of wind revealed the edges of a colossal bone. Its edges were sleek and bright. Bone, much like the armor Shiv wore, but it was pure bone. Bone that had ridges of scar tissue grown over it. Bone that had transparent membranes on the side. Bone with tentacles seeping through certain cracks. As the aerial distortion faded entirely, Angelo let out a brief rasp of air and Shiv laid eyes on a Court Leviathan for the first time in his life.

The entire thing was massive. It was, to his estimation, approximately three times as large as the entity's true form. That was already a kilometer long. It resembled something between a whale and an insect. Legs that reminded Shiv of grasshoppers jutted out from its sides, but were curved and folded inward, hidden around jagged ribs. The head of the creature was axe-shaped. A cluster of eyes ran down the side, and atop its skull, there was a slight slit that gleamed, and a moment thereafter Shiv realized he was looking at a window.

Shiv blinked. He'd seen sky ships before, manor ships that sailed through the air. Those weren't unusual, but even the largest sky ship he saw hadn't been more than 200 meters long. They cost immense amounts of power, and usually it was simply more beneficial for lone Pathbearers with high teleportation or transportation skills to move things across the land. That, and mana cores were pretty rare.

This thing was not a sky ship, it was a sky beast, something that could fly of its own accord, but then could also be used as something of a troop transport for the First Blood.

Shiv saw its capabilities as blood horrors dropped from a ring of spooling tendons, tendons connected to the midsection of the Court Leviathan. And after a new batch of blood horrors were delivered, the tendons snapped free from them, like an umbilical cord detaching from a child. The high vampires who departed the Court Leviathan didn't need these tendons; they simply leaped and sailed through the air, crashing down without suffering any damage. Shiv regarded the scene unfolding before him for a few moments longer, even as Angelo shuddered and struggled in his grasp.

"That's a pretty big beast they got there," Shiv said. He frowned and looked at Angelo. “All that for just you and this town?”

“No,” Angelo breathed. “It was just a thing of convenience. They were meant to serve as support. That is what I overheard.”

“Support?”

“They were preparing to take a Compact Gate nearby. But something happened, and they just… stopped… and they took the opportunity to come for me once they sensed my core… The Compact Gate Guardians didn’t come to chase them off. The patrols were absent too.”

Shiv closed his eyes and struggled not to growl. And there it was again: The ripples of his action. He tried to do good, but consequence always slipped beyond him. This wasn’t something he could predict. The damned system was mocking him. Everything for more strife, isn’t that right, you piece of shit? If you really wanted me to kill some more vampires, just show them to me. You didn’t need to do this.

"Alright. You’re not in the right mindset for this, but the rage is in me now." Shiv walked forward, slipping out from the foliage. "I think they still have some of your people inside that silo. Go get them while I butcher everyone else.  I'm going to take to the air. I'm going to use my Stealth Skill, and I'm going to blanket most of this place in darkness. And then the killing is going to start. Use that as cover.”

Angelo stared at him.

"If you're up for fighting, I recommend you attack and tear through the Blood Horrors holding the streets. There aren't so many other high vampires, and I don't know how good you are. But if you're confident in yourself, go after them.”

“But… the Court Leviathan…” Angelo’s lip curled. “I cannot ask you to do this. I… You…”

“I want this,” Shiv replied. He turned and regarded the rogue vampire for a moment. “I want to kill them now. You didn’t need to ask. You were just the incentive. The system doesn’t care. But it knows I do. You were just the push.”

Angelo looked confused, but something in his resolve was breaking. “This… this is my failing. My foolishness. You need not risk your life

Shiv snorted. "Yeah, just one hero. But hey, these vampires might surprise me and manage to kill me just yet. So here's hoping."

Angelo stared at him like he was a madman.

Shiv laughed as he spiked his gravity field high into the sky, launching himself across the distance in an explosive instant.

He roared into the air like an artillery shell, but his body trailed shadow all the way. In moments, his Creeping Void splashed down across the world, crawling over the land in cascading, billowing folds of blackness. If the vampires saw Shiv, they only got a glance, for afterward came his shadows, came another spike of speed, came the halting of time.

The colossal whale-like beast let out a pitched shriek, but it froze halfway as Shiv manifested his temporal shell. He immediately spiked himself a dozen times, his Inertial Overdrive roaring to life, thundering in a membrane of force, cupping his body, pulsing and squeezing in tight. He exploded forward, even with time paused, and as he drew closer, he felt his Biomancy slip over the Court Leviathan for the first time. The creature's flesh was a work of art. Shiv felt his breath catch for a moment. It wasn't just meat; it was complex, like a lattice. The way it was made was simply sublime. More than that, he felt additional modifications made to it on a level deeper than blood itself. The blood codes. 

He remembered Ekkihurst saying something about that.

But then pulsed a wave of gold from within the creature—a tide of defensive Chronomancy. Shiv was surprised, he didn't expect this, but then as the Chronomantic wave came rushing at him, as he tried to dodge it, he realized what it was. It was like a second layer of the baseline present being enforced around the Court Leviathan. Something that tried to stabilize time and stop Chronomancers from performing their magics nearby: a temporal warding. Adam's rapier had something of that design before as well, before the Recollector broke it.

And that spurred Shiv to go further and faster. Because he knew the wards could be broken.

He impacted the wards hard, and the field emitted around the Court Leviathan shuddered and cracked slightly, but what broke more was Shiv's temporal armor. The entire piece fractured away, and he only had two seconds remaining. Those two seconds, along with his Inertial Overdrive, were more than enough to get him close. 

He slammed against the beast's body, and he reached down using his Biomancy. To his pleasure, he realized it didn't have any magical resistance, and why would it? It was a colossal creature, and to approach vampires in most cases in a battle of Biomancy was to court death itself. Unfortunately for them, Shiv had been seeing death on the regular, and they were practically friends with benefits by this point.

He cast multiple lacerations on the creature's body, and as it split apart, he burrowed his way in with a sudden thrust of his gravitic field. Immediately, he found himself slicing through a secondary membrane lining the interior of the creature's body. These were composed of mono-fibers, thin and reactive, impossibly strong as well. 

He could feel the tensile strength between each and every sinew, but with another laceration spell, they parted as well. He kept going deeper, traveling through a brief maze of bones, until finally he ripped a final layer of inner skin and found himself looking down at an opulent walkway. The walls here were ridged with muscular tissue, but the ground had a plush red carpet, and above, gleaming lights of bioluminescent red drifted from crystallized organic constructs which he couldn't fully comprehend.

Strider of the Unbending Path 122 > 123

His temporal shell shattered. Time resumed. A loud shriek that the Court Leviathan made finished as Shiv promptly burst his inertial sheath. The explosion went off inside the creature, and it staggered violently, and yet to Shiv's astonishment, it didn't burst apart in a massive waterfall of viscera and blood. Instead, it was badly flayed from within, entire sections of its flesh bursting and rupturing. Sections of the walkway that weren't organic tissue ended up embedded through the walls of muscle, but its bones held, most of its interior structure held. 

He found himself digging his way out from ruin, rather than casually burrowing through more of the creature's body, and nigh instantly, the entry wound he made closed. This thing healed faster than any vampire he'd ever seen. Like it had its own internal Woundeaters.

A smile pulled at Shiv's features.

He hadn’t expected much from them, even with the colossal size of the Court Leviathan. He'd just gotten done fighting an eldritch entity, one that existed across time, one that hit so hard even he could barely endure it. But this was something interesting. If nothing else, it would be an education in Biomancy.

Then he sensed something else, a pulsing wave of power building just a few hundred meters below. Psychomancy mana began to concentrate somewhere, and Shiv immediately adapted. 

His Magebreaker was still in pieces. It sometimes vibrated, but it didn't come back together. Something, absence, took a great deal out of the gauntlet. Just another thing he needed to repair or replace. 

Thanks, Guardshead, Shiv thought. Fix it if I can. Then he reached into his cloak and pulled out something he hadn't used in a while. His helmet popped off just as the wave of psychokinetic force washed over him. He slammed the Mask of False Paths over his face. It rattled, it rang, but it did not crack, not even close.

Master-Tier, Shiv realized. He chuckled to himself. Uva would have eaten you alive.

He spiked down, casting multiple laceration spells. The Court Leviathan healed quickly, but as Shiv forced his body into the wound, as it closed around him, he continued to rip, he continued to tear. With every few spikes, he detonated his inertial sheath. He wasn't going fast enough to hurt himself, not really, and he still needed a few seconds before his Chronomancy returned to fullness. But in the meantime, he made do within the Court Leviathan by constantly pumping out more and more of his impenetrable miasma. However, as Shiv dug into the flesh of the beast, the beast's flesh learned of him and responded in kind. As he was a Biomancer, so too was the Court Leviathan, and its inner body came aglow with crimson mana.

Holy crap, Shiv let out a disbelieving laugh. He felt the power trembling through it, and it must have been heroic at the very least. Then more crimson mana flared all around the insides of the creature. He was staring into a welter of blood, a spree of gristle. He tore, he pushed through; he was trying to hunt down the Psychomancer first, trying to find the interior-most vulnerabilities of the Court Leviathan. But then, there came a burst of organic particles spreading within the massive beast. The rush of small particulates was sudden and invasive.

Shiv felt the small motes slip between the gaps in his armor and crawl beneath his skin. Then, he started feeling a tingle within his flesh. A second later, he got confirmation as to what was about to happen.

Disease Resistance 8 > 9

Disease Resistance, Shiv thought. It's been a while since I saw you. And as soon as the thought finished, a swath of painful blisters spread down his back. A spike of immense pain speared through his groin and made his prostate feel like it was on fire. His eyes burned, pus began to leak out from his vision. Shiv tried to use his own Biomancy to ward off the diseases, to ward off whatever this creature was doing to him. And then, he realized it hadn't even cast a spell yet. 

These were casually released infections and viruses.

Shiv had Master-Tier Toughness. He was an immensely powerful Pathbearer by this point. Heroic tier. But in that moment, he also learned a lesson about hubris. A lesson that was taught again and again. There was more than one way to die, and more than one way to die easy. Without the proper inoculation, and as a barely trained Biomancer, all he could do was suffer on and fight forward as long as he could as the disease ate away at him. 

Shiv felt his heart spasm. A growth began to choke his pumping organ, began to grow around him, filling his bowels. His lungs were also being consumed by fast, active threads that withered from the inside, and he soon found himself unable to breathe. But he was a Hero, and with a final inertial detonation, he burst through.

He crashed down within a place that had a massive and complex crystalline platform. There were people with slit throats chained to both sides of the walls, and their blood flowed in complex channels, forming strange patterns on the ground. There he saw a group of seven vampires, seven of them casting their Psychomancy mana to one of their own members. One who conducted the complete mana of their mind magic in tandem, using it to hunt down Shiv, to strike at him over and over. 

As he landed, they all let out a surprise cry of alarm. Shiv chuckled, his voice distorted by the creeping void. He took a few steps towards them, letting out a wheeze. He wanted to taunt them, he wanted to say something to them. But his body along with his skin, began to peel and decompose off of his very bones as strange parasites undid him, unstitched him sinew by sinew.

Adam's gonna make fun of me when he hears about how I died this time. 

And as Shiv fell over, he let out a laugh. This death stressed the importance of getting information and knowing your enemy’s capacities. But also, it was an educational death, and a worthwhile one, for a rush of information entered his mind related to viruses and other matters.

Practical Metabiology 33 > 35

Disease Resistance 9 > 14

Woundeater 83 > 85

His Practical Metabiology climbed a little bit for once after dying, as did his Disease Resistance. Well. This is going to be useful. I think I need to die a few more times at the least…

And once more, the system played its games.

One of the psionic vampires cried out, speaking to their lead Psychomancer, "Elder Sahari, I can't feel... wait, there's someone..." Shiv flung a bone drill through his chest. Then, just as the main Psychomancer of the group detected him, Shiv froze time again, and tore their Lineage Core out from within.