III-1 Deliberate

So, you manage to capture a gate, a city, hell, even a town. Now the question comes, can you keep it? This is a question most people don't really ask themselves. Most people also don't really siege towns, gates, or cities, so they have no experience with the matter. But let me tell you, the story doesn't end after you take a gate. In fact, the story probably only begins.

Now that the fun part of watching most of your friends die in a brutal assault is over, you get to deal with the misery of rounding up the remaining defenders. Some advise just killing them all. This is stupid. Path bearers are worth money. They're worth money to someone, and the stronger they are, the more their allies are willing to pay. If you just execute a Heroic-Tier Pathbearer, that's kind of a waste. 

Sure, it'll take the enemy off the board, but frankly, if you manage to incapacitate them, that's gonna feed your army for a year or two. And who knows? Today's enemies are tomorrow's allies, and the same thing goes the other way around.

But between the point where you just conduct a massacre and make sure that everything is settled neatly and brutally. That, or you arrange for everyone to be sold back to their original companions, faction, owners, whatever. That means you have to hold them. And you have to hold the gate, town, city, whatever. This is where things get a little miserable. For you see, the people you just sieged, they don't much like you. They don't much like your forces breaking in, torturing them, and butchering their loved ones. 

And they definitely wouldn't like you if you or the dipshits you command end up doing “funny” things to them. Funny things that will end with mana bombs going off inside your barracks, mass poisonings, or some of your people ending up getting their throats slit in the night. And so you spiral into reprisals, and we all know how that goes. 

Well, maybe I shouldn't say that. Some of us clearly still need to learn. Repeat after me, kids: “The barbed-wire dildo that is cruelty will end up fucking me in the ass, and the system loves sado-maso shit.”

But then there are the special cases. Maybe the enemy is not quite beaten, or maybe you only took the gate by surprise, and it's still connected somewhere else. The war is not over. It's never over. Peace is the true challenge. And the thing about peace is, it's a brittle, unstable thing. It has to be enforced by power.

So. When you take a place, make sure you clench your fist tight. Because 

-The Days of the Siege by Gatebreaker Chun

III-1

Deliberate

Inertial Overdrive 105 > 108

Gravitic Wrestler 136 > 140

Adamantine Adaption 151 > 155

The Creeping Void 104 > 108

Strider of the Unbending Path 119 > 122

Revenant 40 > 41

Outside Context Problem 58 > 60

Woundeater 81 > 83

Berserk 9 > 17

Shiv was dead again, dead at his own hands, dead for overabusing his inertial sheath to a level his body just couldn't sustain, even with rage-enhanced Berserk. But it had been worth it. He watched as the entity smashed into the gateway. It vanished in a pulse of crawling darkness veiled by static distortions. 

A moment later, Adam pulsed through as well, and Shiv's insides hardened. He hoped the new Gate Lord was prepared for this. He hoped that everything he did would be enough. But for now, he needed to drain something, or someone.

He moved through the air, and as he did, his inertial sheath began to thunder with greater intensity. Without a body to direct a gravitic field with, he still wasn't quite as fast as he was at baseline, but the ease at which he glided through the air was staggering. Shiv winced as he regarded the state of the last surviving district. 

One word could describe Gate Theborn: destroyed. At its base, there was a crater that went down for kilometers. The edges were curved in an uneven accumulation of rubble, and several teleportation anchors could be seen, slightly dented but otherwise preserved and intact. The hanging city, held together by extended bridges, platforms, plazas, and more, were no more, except a final section, the surfacer district, which was also mostly rubble now, thanks to Shiv's violent clash with the entity.

Thousands of vitality signatures glittered below. Thousands were buried, buried in the rubble, scattered across the ground, writhing, moaning in pain. And Shiv felt disgusted. Nausea crawled through him, but he didn't have a stomach, so he couldn't quite throw up. It seemed like no matter how hard he tried, no matter what he did, someone paid for conflict. The system was a cruel overlord. Weakness was punished. Weakness was fatal. And should the truly powerful face each other while you were in the vicinity, while you were lesser than they, a price would be reaped.

As he approached, however, the gateway to the surface flared again. A burst of shadowy mana vomited out a single shape, the shape of a man that shot across the bridge connected to the gateway. He slammed through rows of people, sending them flying into the air, but he seemed out of it. Blood erupted out from Adam’s mouth as he tore through an entire mob of mercenaries. They splattered apart against his armor, and Adam finally ended up stopping dead against someone with High Adept Toughness. 

Shiv's exploded with fury. 

Adam was hurt. Shiv accelerated through the air, and just then the entity emerged. It was glowing for some reason, vibrating with a faint blue sheen that masked the rest of its body. Shiv didn't care. He was going to drain it, and he was going to kill it, no matter what it took. He was going to tear it in half with his Biomancy.

His mind entered a battle trance of rage. His temporal shell flashed around him. Time stopped. Then, he had an echo of his past pinned to the entity. He could use that! And more importantly, he was still alive when the echo was active. A feral thrill came ablaze within Shiv. He grinned. Maybe this was a way to avoid needing to drain people. Maybe he could avoid dying altogether by casting himself into the past? 

Shiv projected himself towards the anchor without hesitation.

This proved to be a terrible mistake. 

His soul went one way. His vitality went another. As the two substances were bound together, Shiv’s Vitae tore down the middle. He screamed. Rose screamed.  His unstable vitality splashed out and dissolved as it bled from his wounded being. Within, two of his skills warred against each other, one the Unique Revenant, the other Master-Tier Chronomancy. Shiv stopped the act before either skill could shatter but the damage was done. And it was brutal. The entire thing hurt almost as bad as immolating his body with Necromancy.

Almost.

As he writhed in the air, struggling to regain his bearings, he watched as the entity flashed, and then faded. He didn't know what was happening, and he was in too much pain to focus. Too much pain. Shiv's mind stopped working. Coldness bled into him as his Vitae poured out…

Soon, they both started fading out of existence.

***

Adam Arrow didn't quite know where Shiv was. And the brutal internal bleeding he suffered from didn't make focusing any easier. There were people all around him. There was blood smeared around his armor. He noticed then that he probably liquefied a few people just from sheer speed alone. The damned monster had hit him hard. When the Recollector smashed him back through the gateway, he was going at colossal speeds, speeds fast enough to render him a projectile that broke sound. His armor was Legendary. The other Pathbearers lined up in front of the gate were not. 

The results were grotesque.

How the… bloody hell did Shiv take any of this damned thing’s hits… Adam gagged.

He tried not to look at the gore-splattered bridge as he took to the air with fiery wings. If he saw the death he caused—No. Not him. The entity did that. It should… But what if he dodged? What if he was faster? He needed to be faster. He needed to be better! He wasn’t enough. Even in the end, there was still a final wound inflicted on his pride.

He wheezed as another mouthful of blood spilled out from him. Adam wasn't just going to need to save Shiv's life; he was going to have to save his own via Shiv. His armor barely spared him, but inside, inside he felt like he was soup, like bones were dancing through his flesh, cutting him with every movement. He didn't even want to imagine the state of his organs. I just need to last, Adam thought. Just… just a few moments.

Against all odds, he focused his Divination, using it in tandem with his Seer of Horizons. A violet field exploded out from him, washing over the world, highlighting things he didn't notice before. Once more, divination was complex, chaotic. He tried to pick out the exact details, and everything he focused on began to hammer his mind with varying perspectives, with lines of text he couldn't fully decipher. It was like causality itself was trying to tell him something, something he didn't have the intellect or the understanding to tease out yet. 

But Shiv wasn't that hard to tease out. No, Shiv, ultimately, was an imprint, a weird flickering imprint on the surface of reality that presently didn't have a body and was rapidly fading as a deluge of substance poured out from him. "No, no, no, no! Shiv, Shiv, Shiv!" Adam cried out. His wings roared. He blasted through the air toward Shiv.

Wings of the Starhawk > 100 (Skill Evolution Imminent)

It was still too slow. Even as he felt another level pass through his Wings of the Starhawk, even as another Evolution drew close, he was still too slow. But he didn't think of that now. All he thought about was saving his—what even was Shiv to him anymore? After all this, after all the blood they spilled together, after watching the other man die for him time and time again, fight so desperately to keep Adam alive, what were they to each other? And why was the world so intent on torturing both of them?

His mother being trapped in Shiv’s soul, the ritual, their struggle together…

Adam pushed it all out of his mind. Thinking was for later. Right now, Shiv needed him. Uva needed him. Gate Theborn and Blackedge needed him. He came to a halt just before where Shiv’s Revenant was. He reached out, he pressed his hand into the near-transparent entity, and immediately he felt a rush drain out from him. 

It was like experiencing the worst fever of his life, and it kept going. It kept sapping him, inebriating him of all his faculties. His senses lessened, his strength faded, even his reaction slowed. Vitality. Vitality was the shape of your life, was the shape of your existence. Valor said one's vitality could recover so long as they didn't die, but it didn't feel good at all. 

But then again, it probably didn't feel good for Shiv to die over and over and over.

“I still don’t know how you're sane after all that, you big, cockroach of a bastard,” Adam muttered.

Seconds passed. Adam nearly blacked out, darkness creeping along the edges of his vision. Before he fell back, though, a hand gripped him, a hand that burst out from a dark cocoon and held him in place. That same hand cast a crimson serpent into Adam's body, and suddenly the young lord felt a detonation of freshness rush back into him. His wounds faded. He was still weak, he was still slowed, he was still—

Shiv looked terrible. He was bleeding still. Even after resurrecting, he was bleeding so much. Blood gushed from a massive wound lining his chest, and he was utterly nude. The fight against the entity had disintegrated all his clothes, but Adam noticed the sheer extent of Shiv’s disfigurement more than his nudity.

The soul-burns… And wound… Adam gagged.

Then, to make matters words, Shiv’s eyes glazed over as his Woundeater burst apart. He shuddered and vomited blood all over Adam’s chest before falling against the new Gate Lord. Adam had to compensate with his wings, lest they both fall. Shiv groaned. He was shivering, bleeding to death. 

Adam carried Shiv over to the final remaining district of Gate Theborn. The last few platforms and half-toppled buildings extended out in a wide platform from the Surface Gateway.  Adam laid Shiv on the ground at the center of a badly ruined plaza. He tore some bedsheets that were scattered on the ground to cover Shiv’s body. 

The dense masses of survivors backed away from their Gate Lord, cleared away from the Deathless that had struggled against the entity for them. Adam looked down at Shiv, and he was shaking. The left side of his body was mostly a charred ruin, and now he had a wide and ugly gash lining his chest. As Shiv moved, his wound opened. Adam could see the gleam of metallic bone, could see the shine of adamantine flesh split wide open. Shiv's blood stopped welling for a moment, and his body began to glow with Biomancy. "Adam," he gagged. Blood splurged out from his mouth. "I need… Just keeping my own blood pumping… Hard to..."

"It's okay, it's okay," Adam said. It wasn't okay. He was hyperventilating. He had no understanding of Biomancy. He had no capability of helping Shiv whatsoever. "Biomancer!" he cried out. "Is anyone here a Biomancer?"

No one approached. No one responded. The remaining mercenaries bunched together on the bridge to the Surface Gateway stared wide-eyed at him. And then, from the group, he saw a face, the face of a goblin. Her expression was ashen, and she held her arm as if it was broken. "Siggy! Siggy!" he cried out. He pointed at her, and she reeled back as if someone just slapped her across the face. "Just get over here, dammit! Get over here!" 

A moment of indecision washed through her features, but then she shot forth, moving on fast feet."Yeah, yeah, Gate Lord. This is Gate Lord Arrow. He's the one I've been telling you about! He’s the guy—”

"Never mind that shit!" Adam cried. "Look—get me a Biomancer. Get someone to help."

And then a hard hand grabbed Adam, a hard hand that shuddered with a layer of thundering force. Adam groaned as he felt something smash hard into his body over and over again. Then, the inertial sheath dissipated. 

Shiv gritted his teeth. "Sorry, it's hard to—Inertial Overdrive… Just builds… Can’t focus." He was slurring his words, his eyes were rolling. His body was still glowed with a brilliant red. He was channeling so much Biomancy mana it was starting to become visible for Adam as well.

"Okay, it's okay," Adam said. He cupped Shiv's face and made the large brute of a man look him in the eye. "You're going to be fine. You're going to be alright."

"I need to focus," Shiv growled. He clenched his jaw. "I need to... I'll keep myself alive, but I won't be able to help you. I fucked myself up bad, Adam. I tore myself. I tried to jump across time… but I didn't have a body. The skills didn't know how to work together—I was just trying to help you and… and…”

"It's okay. It's okay. That's okay," Adam repeated the word over and over again. It was more for him than Shiv. Shiv wasn’t just bleeding materially—-Adam saw his soul was bleeding earlier. And the only one who knew anything about soul wounds was Valor. Fuck!  "Do… do whatever you need to." 

Adam reached out. He caught Siggy by the shoulder and he drew her in close, rougher than he wanted. The goblin was terrified. Adam was desperate. "Find him a Biomancer. Find him as many people with Biomancy as possible. Keep him alive. Do you understand me? And if he dies, let him drain from you. Let him drain from anyone here. Anyone!" Adam shouted. "Anyone! This is my first decree as Gate Lord! Do not let him die! Do not let him die or I will bring the godsdamn mana core down on every bastard mercenary, slaver, and butcher I see! You are responsible for his life!”

He was screaming now. The people flinched away. Adam blinked, realizing the threat he just levied. The threat he just levied on all the slaves, on all the innocent people, on everyone who didn't even have anything to do with this. But what choice did he have? He needed to keep Shiv alive no matter what. He couldn't just let him die. He wouldn't survive the shame of it. He fled earlier. He left Shiv and now... 

"You are not going off to the other side! Do you hear me?" Adam cried. He seized Shiv by a short crop of hair. "Do not die!"

Shiv barely suppressed a whimper, but then a mocking smile crept over his face. "Is that some kind of order, Gate Lord?"

"Yes! And it is a command. Do not disobey me. Do not die. Drain from them. Drain from any of them if you do pass. I'll be back. I need to go… go…”

Shiv grunted and hissed with pain. "Uva… Go find Uva."

And with Shiv's blessing, Adam shot off. He still had worry inside his gut, but Uva…  he didn't know where she was. In the chaos, he lost track of her. She left to help Shiv. He felt her mind peel away from his as she cast herself into the entity's consciousness. 

Gods, diving into an eldritch entity's consciousness. He hoped she wasn't broken. He hoped she wasn't insane. If she went, then there who else to protect them from enemy Psychomancers? Who else would question his plans and make deadpan remarks at him? What would happen to the disgusting romantic overtures that kept happening around him? How would he face Shiv? Ikki? The Composer? Any of the others?

How would he face himself?

If Shiv died, Adam would break. If Uva died, if both of them were gone, if he couldn't save either of them... a weight of despair crept into Adam.

"System! system!" he prayed. He prayed directly to the architect of his strength and misery. He prayed to a thing that didn't speak to them aside from notifications and power blessed upon their very souls. "System!" he cried internally. "I've done everything I could! I've struggled! I've given you a fight! I slew something that I had no business killing! Do not take them from me! Do not! You will not!"

And as if to taunt him and to mock his declaration, rather than sending him anything useful, it displayed a few special notifications: 

Lord Scorn has noted the act of destruction inflicted upon his dimension. 

The Lords of Law have noticed your usurpation of Gate Theborn. 

The Stranger has noticed your murder of its offspring. 

The Stranger—

“NOOOOOOO!”

Screamed so loud, the last notification shattered before Adam’s eyes. He cried out as he clutched his head. Then, there was the sound of something ripping apart. Adam turned his gaze as something started slithering up into the earlier from the corner of his eyes.

Mana boundaries to semi-integrated dimensions removed.

“What?” Adam muttered. And then he felt something

The bottom of Gate Theborn was little more than a crater, a ruin. So much had been destroyed, and the destruction ran so deep that the third gateway wasn't even truly connected to anything anymore. It was just a portal hovering there in the air, a flat plate of shimmering dimensionality mana. However, a tinge of Animancy-blue began to leak through, and that tinge faded. A sprout of darkness and other colors extended out from the gateway to Vulketh. The sprout slithered free, and along its length, new colors began to bloom. New shapes, new organs, eyes. Eyes like the ones Adam saw on the Recollector grew across the world like cancerous smears. Just seeing it made his sanity reel. 

But Adam, more than terrified, was utterly exhausted of this bullshit. As his mind shook, his frustration hit a boiling point first.

"Come the fuck on!" he roared at the world—at the system in particular. “I JUST FELLING KILLED ONE ELDRITCH ENTITY! DO I LOOK LIKE I CAN DO ANOTHER?”

And just then, something tore in from the outside, tore into Gate Theborn starting from the Vulketh Gateway and going up. The world ripped like a piece of paper. The many eldritch eyes unlatched from where they were, and through a rift that revealed countless drifting colors all beyond Adam's comprehension, emerged a colossal shape. He couldn't call it solid, he couldn't call it fluid, he couldn't even call it gas. It felt like it was all three at the same time, or whatever the entity wanted it to be. Its body had many eyes. They glided along, not so different from the eyes that glided on the hand-head of the Recollector, but these eyes were larger, they glowed brighter, and they peered right at Adam. 

Worse, this new entity just kept flooding forth. It dwarfed More and more of it slid over into the world. And with it came a flood of other colors. Colors that didn’t belong in this world. Colors that infected reality and twisted the very fabric of existence. It was like the world was a canvas, and the colors were ink. A new horizon was being painted before Adam, and it wasn’t of Gate Theborn. Or maybe it was simply unmaking parts of Gate Theborn and replacing it with parts from elsewhere.

From the Outside.

“Kill you, kill you, eat you, break you, wear you, wear you, wear you, wear you, wear you.” The entity whispered. Adam’s stomach twisted. He puked while flying as the pitch of the words clawed at part of his mind.

More and more of the entity pulled through the massive, widening chasm. The entire middle of Gate Theborn was now torn open, and there was still more of the entity coming through. Its body, if it could be even described as such, was ridged with gleaming teeth that sang, and between those revolving jaws were eyes. So many drifting eyes. So many colorful eyes. So many eyes, all staring at Adam. And then came the hands, so many hands, breaching out from it. Hands that resembled the Recollector’s head.

Existence quivered. Adam felt madness close it. He also just sighed and started firing his Spellstring.

Arrows charged with lightning, force, fire, frost, mind, and more vanished into the entity. As he fired, he prepared to cast his Divination mana—he still had to find Uva. Then, a pillar of light erupted a kilometer away. A spiral of colors rose into the air, and Adam flinched back with a cry of pain as his mind reeled.

Godsdamned eldritch bullshit won’t end! Adam's divination began to scream incoherent details at him. The system responded by dumping broken text into his mind, and as more of the Outside leaked into Gate Theborn. He tried to keep his focus away from everything that was happening—and that’s when he noticed Uva hovering within the pillar of light. In fact, the pillar was formed around her, bleeding forth from her gaze. Because of course it was. Because a nightmarish being residing in your eyes could only end poorly. But what the bloody hells were they supposed to do otherwise?

Then, as the pillar of light churned and changed into a tide of shifting colors, a voice came. "Stranger," the thing that used Uva's voice called out, "retract your high-spawn-offspring. Do it. Wrong-bad-incorrect-impossible for us to say. The system has deliberately weakened the veil! It is luring you for purpose! Stupid, arrogant, dumb, foolish, blind. The system will send fay. We will be hunted, killed, spawned, killed. 

The Stranger moved. Or rather it didn’t move at all. Instead, it pulled at the world as if space was a carpet, and Adam was a bug stuck to the material. “Offspring killed, denied plan, denied so much. Severed, tethered to this world. Tether cultivated across years, years, time, effort, bargain. God, no more."

"That is your fault," the thing within Uva cried. "Your foolishness, your arrogance. Back, back!"

From the rising pillar of brightness emerged another entity. This one resembled a mess of feathered serpents all coiling around each other. Its appearance reminded Adam of a monster he saw in one of his classes—the orochi. They were of a hue Adam couldn't even name, and the hue constantly changed. They didn't have so many eyes on them, but there were tongues that flaked and licked at the world, leaving scars in space. Adam’s thoughts were empty. He moved on instinct alone.

He flew harder. Flew forward as he lurched closer and closer toward the Stranger. He fast, but without Dimensionality, there was no way he could outpace the Stranger’s tugs. Especially since it was dragging all of space and time toward it. Reality melted. The air tasted of cold glass mixed in mint and piss. Adam lurched. He let out a ragged cry as he flared his wings so hard the skin ripped free from his back. He kept straining. His wings snapped. The Stranger pulled. The Dreamtaker lashed across space. But the Stranger pulled again and Adam was so close to its massive maw, to all the eyes and teeth and—

Something exploded inside Adam Arrow.

Wings of the Starhawk 100 > 101 (Skill Evolution Reached)

Skill Evolution: Wings of the Starhawk (Adept) > Vectors of the Eternal Ascent (Heroic)

Vectors of the Eternal Ascent > 101

His wings exploded. He fiery plumage of the Starhawk faded as six solid, white-hot geometric shapes shone free from the fading flame. They resembled inverted pyramids, and they in threes to Adam’s left and right. And as he commanded himself to move, he exploded into motion, shoot free from the Stranger's grasp and zipping across the land. Friction and air peeled around his wings. He felt silent, without noise or any kind of strain. In fact, he felt lighter than light. This flight was effortless, silent, and he hit his maximum speed as soon as he started flying. There was also the detail of how he flew without propulsion.

“NO!” The Stranger cried out. “SYSTEM! DID THIS JUST TO TAUNT ME! TO FORCE HIS EVOLUTION! WILL TAKE HIM! TAKE HIM! SPITE YOU!”

It reached out to snatch Adam with its many hands. Its eyes flared with colorful brightness and Adam twisted left hard, preparing to brace against the brutal g-forces. G-forces that never came. The Gate Lord blinked. His wings were absolutely quiet, emitted no force, and carried him across kilometers of space in a half-second. The world slowed around him, and even as he reached out, he felt no friction. In fact, it felt like the horizon was zooming to greet him of its own accord.

He continued firing his arrows, and another of his skills drew closer to the brink.

Bowslinger 99 > 100 (Skill Evolution Imminent)

He slipped between the massive gaps in the Dreamtaker’s body, doing his best not to look at the glowing brightness. Unlike with the Stranger, the Dreamtaker didn’t try to attack him. The many-feathered serpents widened themselves, allowing him to pass. He prepared to decelerate as he approached Uva—only to stop immediately without strain at all.

Adam blinked at his new wings in awe and disbelief. “What the hells did I just get?”

Then, another notification appeared before him.

Feat [0/1]:

None

Lord Scorn is throwing a tantrum.

Lord Scorn is calling whoever detonated the Animancy Core in his realm a series of slurs.

Lord Scorn requests that the system convey that the attacker is going to be sodomized by the largest, sharpest piece of obsidian he can find.

Two Heroic-Tier Skills got him a Feat. Adam’s astonishment grew—and his disgust did immediately after. The system. It weakened the veil to provoke this final jump. It wasn’t trying to just torture him—it was torturing him with even more conflict to make him grow stronger—to push him over that final threshold. 

As he looked upon Uva, he saw her body was utterly flaccid. She bounced and shook in the air, more like a flag than a person.

Outside, a clash of colors shook Gate Theborn as the Dreamtaker and Stranger launched nonsense sentences at each other.

“Uva,” Adam said, reach out to grasp the Umbral. She spooled over his hands bonelessly. Light continued to spill forth from her eyes. Just looking at the light for too long made Adam’s vision go double.

Removing mana boundary to semi-integrated dimensions.

“What? Fucking why?” Adam cried. The surrounding eldritch colors grew brighter. The orochi-like body of the Dreamtaker slithered and shook as it was dragged across reality by the Stranger. Between the gaps of the many feathered serpents, he saw a wall of reaching hands lined with eyes curving around the outside. He saw the fabric of this reality break away, and he shifted his gaze back to Uva just as his sanity trembled.

Then, he remembered something. In his raw terror, he forgot that he was Gate Lord. He reached out to the mana core. He barely had time to examine its skills, but he knew one thing he could do. He had to channel the fullness of its cryomancy, and a beam of frost crashed down on the stranger. 

But rather than doing any harm, the Stranger—or perhaps another one of its offspring—simply directed a few of its eyes upward, and a roiling spray of ethereal colors split through the stream of Cryomancy. The stranger's colors splashed into the mana core, and Adam cried out. He felt something pour into his very soul. He was synchronized to the core, and now the entity was striking him through it. It immediately filled, filled with such discordant colors. His white-hot vectors began to flood with darkness, fill with eyes, and something gripped Gate Lord Adam Arrow from within his very soul.

Vectors of the Eternal Ascent > DID YOU THINK YOU COULD FLEE FROM ME ARROW-VERMIN-VESSEL-MURDERER?

“Oh, for fuc—” Adam’s words turned into a howl of anguish as Stranger started pouring its essence into him.