III-4 Responders

Practically every Pathbearer knows that breaking something is easy, but building it back up, or even just making something new, is harder than hell. I appreciate this more than anyone else because even though I am a war mage, most of what I do is build, is reinforce. See, I love fortresses. I love building structures, making architecture. I would have done that as my life's dream if things didn’t go to hell. Alas, I will have to settle with the consolation prize of making the greatest fortresses known to Integrated Earth.

And when it comes to rebuilding, there are few challenges greater, more taxing, and more rewarding than reconstructing a conquered gate from the inside out. See, it usually takes a lot of material, personnel, and firepower to take a gate. So much, in fact, that the words "mass casualties" and "90% infrastructure absolutely obliterated," along with "defenders slaughtered to the last man," accidentally happen when the Master-Tier Pyromancer overcharged his spell.

Accidentally.

Supposedly.

Probably.

On paper.

Functionally, you know that the Master-Tier Pyromancer was just throwing a bitch fit because he lost a special someone under his command, and now he's venting it on the remaining survivors. And then you also know that he's someone important's nephew, and even though you're a master tier as well, connections mean a lot. Of course, connections mean a lot internally. And while your own side fucks you if you try to do the right thing, your enemies probably execute a bunch of their captives as well. Because guess what? They have connections too, and you might have just burned some of them.

But I digress. That's another topic altogether.

Rebuilding a gate from the inside. Let's start with part one: Temporary housing.

Now, housing is difficult. Frankly, let me rephrase. Housing is simple, but good housing is difficult. We've come a long way when it comes to our dwellings. We got all sorts of nice amenities: mana-sustained cooling, temperature control, the whole works. But if you need to hold people temporarily, all you need to do is have enough space, a few structures, quite a few rooms, a place for them to sleep, a place for them to shit, a place for them to eat, a place for them to be held as prisoner, and finally, a place for you to get rid of the dead.

This is part one. Part one sounds simple. It really isn't, especially not when you have to process a few hundred thousand screaming, angry Pathbearers who all aren't so happy that you managed to take their city. And eventually, you need to get them out, because so long as you stay in place, and so long as they are regarded as the local population by the mana core, that gate isn't yours. Not until you elect a new Gate Lord. And then the rest of your problems start kicking in.

That is when we'll get to the fun chapter on mana decay…

-Memoirs of a Master-Tier War Mage

III-4

Responders

The group conducted a hasty retreat back up near the surface gateway. But then they found another issue to contend with: the infrastructure there was devastated. The sheer shockwaves generated from Shiv’s battle against the entity crumbled a lot of buildings past a certain height. As such, they immediately embarked on a rescue effort. Uva and Adam worked primarily to locate survivors, while Shiv proved a remarkably effective excavator, thanks to his Gravitic Wrestler. 

Tactile telekinesis was a beautiful thing, as was the ability to perfectly manipulate something you could touch. As such, he managed to move tons of debris without ever shifting their weight a wrong way.

Without a Gravitic Wrestler, a lot more people would have died. A lot still died, and that was increasingly a theme with being a Pathbearer. No matter what you did, even as you strove to do the right thing, even as you fought as hard as you could, when masters, heroes, and more clashed, it was like a natural disaster. It was a special kind of hell being a lesser Pathbearer, and Shiv knew that hell better than most, as he was forced to be pathless for the bulk of his life.

"And that's the last survivor I sensed," Adam said telepathically.

“Doing another sweep,” Uva declared. “Shiv?”

“Biomancy’s not picking up anything here.”

Shiv pulled a badly wounded slave child out from beneath a slab of broken concrete. She was lucky. There was a table caught there. It snapped in half, but just enough of it retained its structure, pinning her below but not letting her be utterly crushed. Her legs were still mangled, and there was a horrible cut that had taken one of her eyes. Shiv cast a Woundeater into her, and then channeled the spell into one of the many bodies he left piled nearby.

The dead served another use for Shiv. They were repositories for his wyrms. The living, when they were badly injured, often needed immediate assistance. And the dead? Well, there wasn't much he could do for the dead, so he made use of them. He made use of all the dead, including his own bodies. He hoped they would understand. But if not, well, that would be a problem he might never have to deal with, considering his nature.

As he strode out of the ruins, wearing a new set of bone armor, clutching a whimpering, gasping child to his chest, he stared at the terrified masses. Most of them had nowhere to go, and there wasn't nearly enough space across the entirety of the surfacer district to sustain them all, either. Of the few dozen buildings that had been here, only two were still mostly intact, and even they had large cracks along the walls, with every single window blown out. The rest of the district was made up by a plaza and a few large bridges. The bridges now ultimately led to nowhere. The buildings and other plazas they were connected to, other platforms—those were gone, absolutely unmade when Shiv clashed with the entity.

"Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!" the child whimpered and wheezed. Shiv's heart twisted. He looked at the gathered crowds, their densely packed bodies pressed together, their pale, tired, terrified faces showing just how fragile their courage was.

"Another lost child," Shiv said across his link. "No idea where the mother is. Didn't see her in the rubble. Couldn't feel anything with my Biomancy either."

"Place her with the others first," Uva said clinically. When she got focused, she got very, very good at compartmentalizing.

Shiv hovered up into the air and drifted over a few hundred meters toward a pin he constructed using his own adamantine bones. There, small tents he made from his skin decoy floated in the air. Inside, tables and first aid stations had been set up. While the mercenaries here were mostly slave runners and other unsavory Sell-Skills for hire, they still had the martial discipline to obey orders and to understand the situation they were in. As such, their Biomancers volunteered immediately with some prodding by Siggy, and other Pathbearers with their own skills assisted in the first-response effort.

But even so, there was an aura of palpable dread in the air, an aura that constantly fed Shiv's Dread Aura skill.

Dread Aura 86 > 88

As people looked upon him, their eyes widened, their pupils dilated, their pulse quickened, and they always looked away. More than a few Pathbearers were High Adepts of Awareness and Reflexes. They saw what he did. They had a guess about what he could do, about his potential tier and skills, and they told the others thereafter. Most of the weaker mercenaries avoided his gaze, did their best to stay out of his way. Some of the stronger ones let their eyes linger on him. One or two were Master-Tier, and they stared longer than most. But they, too, looked away, their courage crumbling as he glared back at them.

He knew what was going through their minds. He was, in a sense, a little bit like them. He had to be. To hunt all those lesser vampires as a pathless, there was always the tantalizing desire to see if you could kill something far out of your league. But cold rationality blunted that animal desire. A Master-Tier was devastating, someone that could knock down buildings, someone that could cause massive civil destruction. 

A Hero was a city breaker, if unchecked. And now, aside from Uva and Adam, Shiv was completely and utterly unchecked.

But that led him down to another, more perilous thought. Even though he could tear everyone in the city apart—and he had good odds of killing everyone if he mounted a surprise attack right now, if he used a combination of his Inertial Overdrive and his Strider of the Unbending Path—who was going to stop him? Who was going to make that wrong, right?

And an answer came to him as easily as the sun was certain to rise in the dawn: Adam Arrow.

Another fragment of Shiv's mind snapped back into place, and he felt himself approaching full coherence again. He could indulge deeper thoughts. And aside from considering why the system had unleashed so much torment on them, had forced them into so much strife in such a short period, was a realization. 

He and Adam were mirroring each other slightly. Their Heroic-Tier reflexes were almost inverse. Shiv couldn't turn; he was an avalanche of building speed and destruction, destructive to the extreme, impossibly fast if given the time to stack his gravity spikes. But he didn't start that way. The one who started immediately faster and maintained that speed without any weight pressing on him was Adam Arrow.

Adam Arrow, who had a new Divination Master-Tier skill. Adam Arrow, who had Necromancy and that vambrace. Adam Arrow, who could turn the azure dawn on Shiv if he deemed him vile or an adversary, if that was how The Righteous Dawn Prevails worked. Up close, Adam was fragile, but that was just the thing: Shiv would have to surprise Adam if he wanted to get up close. And he needed to exploit his temporal shell to maximum effectiveness if he didn't want Adam to incapacitate or, more likely, kill him instantly. Adam didn't miss so much. His Veilpiercers traveled across dimensions and arrived in a near instant.

Everything about how the new Gate Lord was developing screamed counter: A silver dagger meant to slay a monster.

A monster that was Shiv.

I see the game you're playing, he thought, spitting his hatred and slightly sour admiration at the system. He did have a counter. His name was Adam Arrow. And potentially, Uva. But she now occupied stranger territory. Frankly, she was more of a danger and a predator for Adam than she was to Shiv. 

If he managed to induce a berserk state on himself, she wouldn't be able to control him. More importantly, she was far slower, and she had nothing to use against his time magic capabilities. He might not be able to get to her easily in most cases, but between his creeping rot, his Chronomancy, his Inertial Overdrive, she couldn't respond to him. She couldn't come close to hurting him.

And so I see the shape of something, he thought. I see the shape of a triangle between us. A counter against a counter against a counter.

He placed the slave child down near the others, and a tall elven woman greeted him with a nod but didn't meet his gaze. The children flinched away, all bunching together in the corner of the room. Their small faces were painted with absolute petrification, absolute terror, and that clawed at Shiv's mood the worst of all. He didn't mind if his enemies were afraid of him. He preferred it if the martial path-bearers here—the mercenaries, the guards, the deserters—were afraid of him. That instilled some measure of order, even without a naked use of force. But the common people, the innocents, for them to look at him with such scorn…

Godsdammit, he thought. I left Blackedge. I became a Pathbearer. I didn't want to go back to being like that. Yes, it was fear rather than outright disgust. Yes, he held a great measure of power, but he didn't want any reminders of Blackedge, especially since he was going to be going back to Blackedge really soon.

Shiv retreated from the medical tent as fast as he could, rising back into the air.

"Are you all right?" Uva asked him.

"I'm fine," Shiv replied. He wasn't sure if that was a lie. He was fine, better than before, now that his mind was almost completely healed, but he was still slightly bothered.

"Do you remember what I told you when you first arrived at Weave?"

"Yeah," Shiv said. "Reputations can change, and they can change pretty fast."

"With just a few deeds," Uva finished. "They know you as someone clad in the visages of death right now. They think you might be a Necrotech. That is a good thing. As long as we keep our role and allegiances ambiguous, they will have to keep guessing, and it will make them uncertain. Some of that may make you feel uncomfortable, and I understand why. But understand that sometimes a slight bit of discomfort goes a long way to cementing an enduring advantage." 

And once more, there was that Uva pragmatism shining through.

"Six hours," Adam said through their shared telepathic link. His mind was beyond stressed. He had been casting a Seer of Horizons into the rubble, seeking any sign of life, anyone that he could still save. "Six hours… six hours, and 3,211 lives out of 22,000," he breathed. "22,000 people."

However bad Shiv felt, Adam felt it worse. And where Shiv's thoughts drifted toward the casual cruelty of the world and the existential misery of being a low-tier path-bearer or, God-forbid, a pathless, Adam took every death onto his ego. Every death was a personal affront to him, a failure on his part.

Uva jabbed him. She used one of her strands to spear deep into his mind and rattle him. Shiv felt Adam's sudden alarm.

"What was that for?" he cried out, his woes momentarily lost to him.

"No," Uva simply said. Her voice was gentle, but cold and firm at the same time. "You are not doing that. You will not reinforce this habit."

"What habit?" Adam snapped. "A habit in which we failed to save—"

"No," Uva interrupted him again. "There are a mixture of responses," she began, "a mixture of responses that one can have to this situation. You, Adam, fit a template of impossible perfection. And that perfection will ruin your performance. Do you understand me? Because you punish yourself for not achieving the most optimal result, ignoring all the facts of the world, ignoring your own limitations, you will break yourself down, and you will simply reach a point where you are incapable of even doing good. For that's how much you have eroded your own mental capacity with self-loathing."

Adam's resulting silence was a sullen one, and she prodded him again. "Fight it," she ordered. "I know it's not easy. I know it's counterintuitive. I know it is unlike anything…" She paused and rephrased. "I know that it doesn't feel right for you to just let this go. But you do not need to talk to yourself when you feel these ill feelings. Just let them be that, ill feelings, and tell yourself that you will use these ill feelings to do better, to serve these people. That, before anything else, before even Psychomancy, is the first lesson in shaping your own mind. You must control what you say to yourself. You must control what your own narrative is. If you cannot even do that, then you will fall to the whims of external forces and misfortunes every time."

Her tone softened, and he felt her do this deliberately, tactically. She knew how to talk to Adam, just like she knew how to talk to him. As she said before, the first thing the Psychomancer learned to control was her own mind, and she was giving him a lesson in progress.

"We have all experienced a tremendous ordeal," she said, and once more, she very deliberately revealed something else about her, about her own damage. Both of them felt her uncertainty, her terror, and she withdrew from them a second later. But the effect was achieved. A reminder that she too was, like them, vulnerable, fallible. And she turned the sympathy to something she could use, something that Adam wouldn't argue against, that she could follow, and forged it into a means of harnessing their focus. "We can process what happened to us later. But right now, we need to finish setting up a temporary means of shelter for all these people."

"Yeah, she's right," Shiv said. "I kind of ran out of bone. I could die a few times and…”

"That would not be necessary," Uva said. "Can Hu has more than enough material to work with the garden and the ruins to scavenge from. Food and sustenance will be an issue soon, however. The agriculture district and the Hydromancy plant have been destroyed. They will need to be replaced.”

Shiv felt the urge to cringe. That's right. Can Hu was a Geomancer now. But more than that, Can Hu was a crafter. He knew how to build. And rudimentary shelters shouldn't be beyond the penitent's capabilities.

Shiv pulled his gravity field. He shot high into the air. And he sailed to the top of one of the two mostly intact buildings. There, a small bunker made from a dense layer of alloy dotted the roof. And within, Can Hu, Valor, and Adam resided, monitoring the situation around what remained of Gate Theborn.

Gate Theborn. Shiv didn't even think it was going to be called that anymore. There wasn't much of Gate Theborn left. Practically no Vultegs alive either. If there were, he didn't see any. Then he thought back to the Guardshead Leu, the suddenness of her death. How her revenge had only been half achieved. And then he thought of her slugs. And the coldness washed through in a near despair that he felt vicariously on her behalf.

He didn't know much about her. And she was so overly concerned by revenge that she seemed a shell of a person. But still, it was a life. A life taken suddenly. With no hint or way for anyone else to save her. She couldn't have anticipated that. She couldn't have known what was hiding within Confriga's sword. No one else could, either. He didn't have his Chronomancy at that time. More importantly, he wasn't near strong enough to face the entity head on. If he clashed then… even if he, at his current stage of advancement, with his new skills, with all his power, was cast back in time to face the entity once more, he couldn't have saved Leu. She didn't have the toughness necessary to stay alive during a clash between Shiv and the eldritch nightmare.

Quietly, Shiv muttered something in eulogy to Guardshead Leu and her poor, dead slugs. "I hope your clutch-brother saw what you did from the after… if there’s an after," he said. "I hope there's something after all this for you. You gave a whole goddamn lot for revenge. But the system… the system didn't care about you. But I did. I wish I could have cooked for you again. I wish…" Shiv drew in a breath. "I wish there was a chance for you to be a person in the end."

And Shiv sighed. "I wished a lot of things in my life. I'll make sure that you get a grave somewhere. That you're remembered for a time, maybe. I’ll remember you. That's all I can do now."

As he drifted toward the bunker, he heard Uva hum an approval. "It was something, at least. It is good to be remembered after you pass."

Shiv still didn't feel it was enough.

"It never is," she replied. "When my mother died, the pain was raw at first. But what caused me, what wounded me, every day, was the absence. The death of all possibility. Death is… there is nothing. Nothing that properly encompasses what it does to the living. We have metaphors. We have stories. But an end. No return. No tomorrow. It is a dreadful thing."

"It's the system's favorite thing," Shiv replied, slightly dour. And then he considered his own self, his own path. "And it might be why I'm so favored. But that doesn't really explain either of you."

"It does," Valor said. His mind felt weak, but there was a clarity to him, an intensity to his thoughts that hadn't been there before. "It does. It is all because of you, Shiv" Valor said. There was no accusation in his voice, but he was certain. “All of you. Listen. I think I have… a working theory as to why you are enduring so much attention from the system.”

"I will remain in contact through my Psychomancy," Uva said. "In the meantime, I will watch. Someone has to keep an eye on the survivors."

"Is that really necessary?" Adam asked. "It seems overkill. They're already badly traumatized. They're scared."

"We don't know what the mercenaries might do. And there are also diplomats and essential personnel here. They belong to organizations and nations that have been in contact with Compact for a while. I have already intercepted over a hundredescape attempts."

"Escape attempts?" Adam asked suddenly. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"It was unnecessary. I resolved it," and she said it with a simple finality.

"What do you mean you resolved it?" Adam asked.

"They're still alive," Uva answered. "They will only wake, however, when I decide to return some of their faculties to them."

And once more, the young lord shuddered, and the triangle of strategic checks and balances between them shone clearer than ever.

"That is something else I must talk about," Valor said. "The balance is deliberate." At that declaration, Adam, Shiv, and Uva's minds all went cold at the same time.

"There are many theories as to how one becomes system favored," Valor began. He still seemed weak, but he was animated. He stayed near Adam at all times, and the Young Lord's sun kept him supplied with enough soul-boosting power that he sustained himself. The insides of the Garden of Bountiful Alloy had been rendered sparse as Can Hu harvested a final chunk of iron from the tree which it grew on. The garden was bare, but slowly new buds were sprouting. New bits of metal and material would form in due time. For now, this place was exhausted, and it served just fine as a final refuge for the team during their current predicament.

"Some believe that achieving rapid growth, having multiple epiphanies at once, and prevailing against great challenges is enough to make you all system favored," Valor paused for emphasis. "I disagree. Now, what makes you system favored goes back to what the system wants."

"Strife," Adam said.

"Correct, but it is how you interact with strife that catches the system's attention. Take Shiv, for instance. When you landed in the Abyss, what happened?"

Shiv blinked. "I died."

"Yes. And then, when you resurrected?"

"Well then I fought a cave biter baby for a while, and it ate me. Several times. Crushed me more than a few." Shiv winced. It was odd. It felt like a lifetime ago. To think that a cave biter infant would be a threat to him now was laughable after the hellish fight he just had with the Recollector.

"Indeed. And now I think the system is confused. You have a Unique Skill. You want to know what makes a skill unique? It is the way a skill has never been classified by the system before. The way the skill has never been experienced or noted by the system before. No one else has died and come back like you. When one undergoes the ritual of the dichotomous soul in the Necrotech Legions, anytime one of their bodies are destroyed, they do not technically die. Their soul simply melds back together.

“You exist in several places at once. It is basically averting death by sacrificing portions of physical bodies, becoming a spiritual hydra in a sense. You do not do that. You could literally die. Furthermore, you come undone, but your spirit does not dissolve because it's bound to your vitality. Your mind does not disintegrate because it's bound to your spirit. And all this comes together to form a strange substance that somehow stabilizes and reverts you to the last instant before you were dead. And your consciousness is fundamentally not interrupted. The process is continuous, even if you were knocked unconscious."

"And so," Valor said, before he groaned again. Adam steadied the legendary Pathbearer and poured more azure light into him. "Thank you, Adam," Valor wheezed. "Every time you lose focus, though… My skills and soul weaken… And so," he continued with a hint of strain to his voice, "though Shiv is growing stronger, though the system does recognize his Revenant as a Unique Skill, it is also confusing it. Your death feeds your own legend. Your own mana grows as you die. But the strife clings to you still. It notes your deaths, your repeated defeats in these conflicts, yet you do not go away. You persist. And I think… I think you are confusing the system, or you have created a point of infatuation with you."

Shiv stared back. He didn't know what else to say. "A point of infatuation?" Shiv muttered.

"The system can be infatuated with someone as much as it can. Much of the system is still a mystery to me. I cannot proclaim to be the master of the system, to know it so deeply, especially now, in my broken, broken, scattered state," Valor spat, as if disgusted with what he was right now. "However, I do know this. I knew I was system favored after I survived… after I murdered my mother… I fled from her great castle, leaving it burning behind me, escaping multiple Pathbearers that were greater than me, that had many more skills than I did. It was odds defying. More than that, it was ridiculous. It was a miracle I was alive. And as I wandered through the chaos, I escaped into the wilderness. I endured the greatest struggles thereafter."

"What do you mean?" Uva said.

"I mean, the attempts on my life kept coming," Valor's voice was hard and bitter. "As soon as I fled into the wilderness, a group of creatures came upon me. Basilisks. I was wounded then. I had to rely on my prodigious Stealth Skill to stay alive, but even so, they nearly found me. They nearly killed me. While I was recovering, I had to master Adept-Tier Metabiology to pair that with my Biomancy to cure myself of a fever, and then subsequently to rid myself of a terrible poison that was inflicted upon me because I chose to recover in the wrong cave and was bitten by one of the most venomous insects in all the Abyss."

Shiv winced as he thought about Valor’s struggles. It reminded him a bit of his journey through the Abyss. How would I get through that? Shiv thought. And then he realized he did have a blueprint of getting through it by dying over and over. He did die over and over. The Umbral Wilderness was a dangerous place. And to cross that, wounded, alone, and without a Revenant skill… Shiv felt his pulse quicken slightly. Yeah, the only reason I'm still here is because of my Revenant Skill. I'd be dead-dead otherwise. Valor’s a hard bastard.

And then, Valor let out a sigh. "And then there was the mana storm."

"The what?" Adam cried.

"Yes, the mana storm. That nearly killed me immediately. Do you know how fast the temperatures can shift within a mana storm? I had Pyromancy and Chronomancy. Neither as Adept. By the time I emerged from the storm, I was an Adept and had lost an arm. I was then promptly attacked by a group of Manticores."

"For the Ascendants' sake," Adam gasped.

"The Manticores weren't so bad, especially because a group of Dimensionals promptly appeared. You see, they emerged from a gate left by the mana storm, and I didn't notice, for I was badly injured. I tried to resist them, and they beat me brutally, until they broke every bone in my body and took me away to their realm."

By now, both Adam and Shiv reacted with shared sighs. Uva winced constantly. 

"Broken Moon," Shiv muttered. "That’s godsdamned hell."

"Hell was when they started torturing me. For you see, they didn't have Biomancy in their realm, and they were amused that I had enough knowledge to put myself back together. It was under their cruel tutelage that I first developed Psychomancy. I was there for approximately six months. Six months, they forced me to fight in their strange extra-dimensional arena. Six months, I trained, I toiled, I tested the limits of their psionic inhibitors, planning my escape. When I eventually did, leading an uprising, I left through the gate from which they came, toppling their city, and found myself fleeing back into the Umbral Wilderness, just as wounded as I was months ago, after I escaped my mother's castle. This was when two other mana storms came for me."

Adam clutched his head. He would have called Valor a liar, except this was Valor, and more than likely, Valor might have been understating the sheer, nightmarish tribulations he had to endure.

By this point, though, Valor let out a bitter chuckle. "I was so battle-hardened, I didn't even care anymore. I marched off into the storm, and that was how I developed Aeromancy. Do you see my point here?"

"Yeah," Shiv said. "Being system-favored, means the system keeps trying to kill you in rougher, more violent ways."

"It seems like that," Valor said, "but rather the system constantly tests you, throwing greater and more severe challenges that you just barely have a chance to survive. And if you do, it feeds you, it rewards you, it nourishes your spirit from the sheer amount of mana generated during the struggle. By this point, I was still mostly an adept. My Stealth Skill was in master. It was my only Master Skill. Frankly, without my prodigious ability to hide, I should have died long, long ago. But even so, I only turned master after leaving those two storms. Six months, Shiv. Six months to your… what was it, a week?"

"Something like that," Shiv replied. He was starting to see Valor's point.

"You become a vortex, a magnet for all strife once you are favored. It is like the world bestows a hidden quality to you. A hidden judgment. This one refuses to die. This one will stand and fight and endure in the face of impossible, overwhelming odds. This one will make for a good story." 

There was a growl at the end of Valor's voice. "And that is what is happening to you, Shiv. You will not die. You refuse. You don't stay dead. And so it sends greater and graver threats. It whispers things to you. It gives you Foreshadowing in part because whatever has happened during this ritual, but also probably because it can draw you into more conflicts that way. It can invite more people to stand against you, to place you against adversaries you have no business facing. What happened at Passage was absurd, but it was also to the system's desires. The quests you keep getting. They are attempts to find where your story might end, to feed a grand conflict. And with every subsequent moment, it is only building."

"Then what about us?" Uva asked, extremely curious why she and Adam were also growing so fast.

"Because you have been caught in his vortex," Valor said with a burst of passion. "Shiv refuses to die. The system tries and tries to end him, has done things beyond absurd to kill him and make him stay dead. For most, there is a point of struggle they hit and they have to surrender. They have to take a moment to recover. They back away. And because they back away, because they avoid a fight, their narrative does not become one of constant, extreme, and high-frequency conflicts. Constant, extreme conflicts that they should have no business surviving. But Shiv’s life has been nothing but conflicts he has no business surviving."

"My entire life," Shiv muttered. All of them looked at him. "I hunted lesser vampires," he said, "in the ruins, as a Pathless. I was trying to get a Path.”

"And that is another problem," Valor said, shaking a hand at Shiv. "That builds upon your narrative. You are a maelstrom of strife, whether you want it or not. And everyone who stays near you, everyone who spends any prolonged time with you, who has faced these incidents with you and come out alive over and over again, will inevitably become system favored just because the colossal threats it will continuously send at you."

"And so," Adam muttered, swallowing, as his expression looked stunned. "You're saying that because the system keeps killing Shiv, but he doesn't stay dead, he only prevails after coming back, that he is, effectively, beyond favored."

"Yes," Valor finished. "And because you are with him, because both of you have chosen to bind yourself to him in one fashion or another, and both of you fought alongside of him, survived things alongside of him, more than anyone else, you too are beyond favored. You, too, are being nourished by conflicts far out of your scale. And though I don't know if the system is conscious, if it has a personality, I can tell you this: it plans, it dreams of futures, it has desired outcomes it might like to see, grand conflicts that take shape eons in advance. Adam, it gave you the vambrace for a reason. It gave you your current skills for a reason. Look at your capabilities and think of what someone like you can do to Shiv, specifically you."

And Adam did. And Shiv did. They looked at each other and shared a mutually uncomfortable expression.

"Uva, you too. Because the system made Adam, because it does not know how to respond to Shiv, it too makes something that is easy and capable of removing Adam from the field. Should a story call for it?"

"And so we're all primed to fight each other eventually?" she asked.

"Yes!" Valor said. "All legendary Pathbearers have experienced this. It is called the inevitability of strife, and system favored know this more than anyone else. People see you fight for those you care for, and it will make sure someone somewhere is more than capable of finishing you, that they have the right combination of skills, experiences, and more to bring you to a final end."

And so the mood within the Garden of Bountiful Alloy turned black and dreadful, and it only soured further as a quest appeared in their vision, a quest offered by Lord Scorn.

Quest Gained: Eliminate the COCKSUCKING FUCKS WHO STOLE MY MOTHERFUCKING GATE AND DROPPED AN UNSTABLE ANIMANCY CORE INTO MY FUCKING DIMENSION! AND THIS GOES FOR YOU TOO, FUCKASS! IF THE ONE THAT DID THE SHIT IS GETTING THIS QUEST TOO, KILL YOURSELF! KILL YOURSELF BEFORE I COME FOR YOUR ASS WITH MY FUCKING OBSIDIAN COCKKKKKKKKKK! GET TO IT, CUNTS! YOU GOT A MONTH!

Rewards: +20 Levels for a Selected Skill; +10 Levels for a Selected SKill; Two [Hidden] Master-Tier items; the obsidian dildo I will use to fuck the bomber’s corpse until I make a stillborn gore baby with his or her ass; Adept-Tier Skill Evolution or some shit—just kill the motherfucker!

Failure: I pour UNHOLY FIRE AND RUIN INTO GATE THEBORN AND INCINERATE ALL YOU REMAINING COCKSUCKERS! I WILL POUR SO MUCH FUCKING FIRE THAT THE UMBRAL WILDERNESS WILL BURN! I MEAN REALLY FUCKING BURN FOR A MONTH. AND TELL THE FIVE FAITHS TO LICK MY TAINT!

Uva let out an exhausted breath as she slumped over. Shiv balled his fists and gritted his teeth. Adam let out an exhausted, ragged cry and fell to his knees.