II-59 Companions (III)

“That’s one big, ugly asshole. And a bigger, uglier hammer.”

“He’s not that big.”

“You always say that shit. I always have to pull your dumb ass out of the fire.”

“Harlon, which one of us saves the other more?”

“Me. Because every time you need to save me, it’s because I put myself in danger to pull your ass out of the fire.”

“So. We are at best even.”

“No. You’re a dumb shit, and I’m a fucking moron because however stupid you are to get us into these situations, I’m stupid enough to keep following you and getting myself hurt during.”

“Well, that sounds like Vera’s right, then. Some more Toughness will do you good.”

“Hey. Fuck you. You don’t see me using your wife’s words against you. She always says think ahead, think ahead. We wouldn’t be fighting these guys if you thought ahead.”

“And I wouldn’t be about to cripple this boy if he didn’t try to grab Rose.”

“...Yeah. But it’s more fun to blame you.”

“Harlon.”

“Yeah?”

“Has anyone told you you’re kind of a bastard?”

“You. All the time. So. You drop the big one and I’ll hurt the little guys? The usual way this goes?”

“Yeah. The usual way. And Harlon.”

“Hm.”

“Thanks for being here.”

“Just start the fight, dipshit.”

-Harlon Lowe and Roland Arrow

II-59

Companions (III)

“...Cast yourself into Adam’s mind. Do it. Now!”

More of Shiv’s mind snapped back together, but that was of secondary importance by far. What consumed all of his focus right then was the entity. Its retroactive rivers were retracting back into its original form. As the true shape of the eldritch being ripped free from Confriga’s decayed husk, the entity consumed all of its retroactive rivers. 

The golden mana of its Chronomancy condensed around its immense form. Shiv blasted toward the entity with a spike of his gravitic field. His temporal shell was only half regenerated, but he was the only one that could stall this thing and contend with its time magic. But to Shiv’s disbelief, the entity still wasn’t done transforming. He drained momentum by slamming his field against his body. His speed spiked. He manifested his Strider of the Unbending Path over himself and reduced time to a trickle as he got within five hundred meters.

The creature’s physical manifestation twitched to a sudden halt just as it prepared to respond. But its material form was the least of his concerns. The Chronomancy mana around the creature began to sour without Confriga. The gold turned tarnished. Spots formed within the mana, spots painted with hues Shiv couldn’t comprehend. The entity’s “mana field” burst apart just as Shiv hammered a knee into one of its hundred-meter-long head fingers and tried to bend it off to the side. 

The temporal detonation washed over Shiv but failed to fling him back in time. However, as the temporal explosion swept over him, he saw it paint an outline behind him as it traveled outward. It painted ethereal chronological echoes of him across the span of ten seconds. They trembled across various places in existence, and Shiv felt his temporal shell resonate with them.

Just then, the world around Shiv grew unbearable bright with burning time mana. And he saw the immolated visage of the entity multiply. Instead of Shiv facing a kilometer-sized eldritch titan with a great many temporal echoes bound to it by retroactive rivers, he was now dealing with twenty-six kilometer-sized eldritch titans. One that lingered in the present, while the twenty-five existed in some kind of twisted past-present mix that allowed them to affect the current time while being seconds behind.

None of them were echoes. All of them were glaring at him with those golden, time accelerating eyes, and Shiv’s stomach plunged as his damaged brain realized just how felling fucked he was.

The only source of consolation was how all the entities seemed to be dissolving. Like the natural passage of time was grinding them all to dust.

But they weren’t dissolving nearly fast enough to spare Shiv as they all prepared to unleash a flood of time-accelerating beams from the hundreds of eyes lining their enormous hand-heads.

Then, in a haze of mind-broken stupor, a series of realizations came to Shiv.

Most of what the entity did with time while it possessed Confriga should be achievable by another Chronomancer. Well, aside from the echoes. That was utterly unnatural. Well, aside from the damned echoes. That was What it did within his body was all achievable through Chronomancy. What Shiv currently beheld was unnatural. Things had pasts and presents. What they didn’t have were pasts that coexisted with their presents—as if the two were on the same spectrum of time.

And that meant that Shiv could theoretically do what it did earlier. At least somewhat.

His temporal armor also wasn’t actually solidified. The mana was just moving so fast that it appeared solid. So long as his temporal armor remained intact, Shiv was the only one who could manipulate his personal chronological progression. And that allowed him to separate and manipulate his personal progress through time from how the world naturally progressed—or the mana of a rival Chronomancer.

And he wasn’t actually stopping all the time in the world by driving his Chronomancy mana against the rushing current of the fleeting present.  In effect, he was immersed in a magical shroud of fluid chronology, the thing he really did with it so far was accelerate his own pace of time so fast that the rest of the world became still. Effectively, one of his seconds might as well have been a year outside at the speed his mana was surging around him. It also induced a feeling of temporal friction as it ground against the slower pace of natural time, thus straining his movements.

Accelerating his personal pace of time was a powerful ability, but it should be far from the only thing he could do with Chronomancy.

His kukri allowed him to anchor himself to a target across time. The entity could slip back in time across its retroactive rivers. Or use it to displace Shiv back across his own chronological history. And if it could do it to him, why could he do the same? 

Thousands of temporal beams speared out toward Shiv from every entity at all once, Shiv slammed his fists together one final time and filled his Momentum Core just so he could have another second to focus—to act.

Shit! Uh, okay. Moving my Chronomancy mana really fast around me is easy, but how do I move myself back in time? Godsdamn you system! And then Shiv sensed the resonance between him and his temporal echoes. Unlike with the entity, his echoes were just imprints on time. They couldn’t act or react, they didn’t exist in a retroactive river, but they were there. They stretched out over a vast distance of space, and he could feel each of them—there was a feeling of magnetism that pulled at him. Called to him.

For the first time, Shiv did something different from hyper-accelerating the dense field of Chronomancy, coating his body. He let instinct guide him. Instinct, because a good portion of his mind was still badly damaged. He had no room for complex thought. 

But instinct was enough.

Instead of moving his mana, he tried casting it out of him, the same way he might launch a spell via his Woundeater. However, his Chronomancy was rooted to his body—molded to him. Where it moved, he would move and vice versa. He tried directing his magic, but as he focused, his faint temporal echoes came aglow with golden radiance. Ten seconds of time. Ten places in space. Shiv felt a magnetism connected to each instance of himself, each of them as if mana anchors he could attach himself to. His Momentum Core discharged. Shiv reached out as far as he could and cast himself back across his own history.

His temporal shell cracked apart. But Shiv was reeled back across time, zipping through each of his temporal imprints until he snapped in place to where he was ten full seconds ago. The sensation felt just like using his kukri’s Chrono-Anchored Strike—and that was probably part of the reason his Chronomancy Skill Evolution turned out the way it did.

As he arrived, the last pieces of his shell broke away, leaving him vulnerable. But every beam unleashed by twenty-collective 25 entities struck nothing at all. 

Thousands of time accelerating beams tore through the place where Shiv used to be. A half-second later, he promptly discharged past them, leaving the eldritch time-creature as surprised as he was.

Dammit, Shiv thought, as he crashed through a bridge and accelerated toward the obliterated bedrock of Gate Theborn. I wish I figured that shit out sooner. Godsdamned you, system. Just felling throwing me a skill without letting me practice…

“WHAT?” The entities howled as one. "How move, didn't see progress! I COULDN’T SENSE YOUR PAST! CAN’T MOVE YOUR PAST OR FUTURE! ROOTED! ROOTED ONLY TO YOURSELF! FIXED TIMELINE IN MAGIC! STRIDER! STRIDER! WHY DRACONIC SKILL EVOLUTION! HOW DO YOU HAVE THIS?"

But while the entity stuck in the present raged, all the other ones broke away to crush Shiv beneath their immense bodies. Even with his temporal shell broken, he could still perceive the other entities due to his attunement to Chronomancy. The way the entities could all attack his present despite being things from the past was bullshit. The fact that they were all a kilometer in size was also bullshit. 

He barely reacted in time. He pulled himself to the side using his gravitic field and gained a stay of execution. Then, another two entities descended, and their shadows swallowed him.

Silhouette > 97

They missed. They misjudged his exact position due to his outline. Once more, Silhouette saves my—

Shiv’s thought broke as one of the entities finally slammed down on him. The world went white with pain. Shiv’s body let out a series of sickening cracks. Adamantine Adaption kept him alive, but the blow was still harder than anything he ever took. When the entity drove its hand shaped head into him, the air didn't combust and inferno didn't spread. Instead, the air ionized as plasma consumed Shiv. Everything went bright, and he ended getting ground into the bottom of the gate. A tidal wave of heavy stone broke and melted around Shiv as a firestorm seared his skin.

He let out an agonized rasp as he puked out blood for what felt like the thousandth time. And before he could try shifting out of context or even struggling against the temporally displaced entity pressing down on him, another entity phased through it and slammed down on Shiv again. 

Shiv choked. Both of his lungs burst. More entities crashed down on him. His bones shattered. His muscles tore. He saw Adam’s arrows tear through corrosive rifts and pass through the entities without ever hitting them. The Young Lord knew where they were, but he couldn’t affect when they were. The only one he could affect was—

The entity rooted in to the present moment smashed against Shiv thereafter and everything went dark. It felt like a second. It felt like an eternity. Then, with a final heavy blow, Shiv jolted back to a formless consciousness and realized he was dead.

Momentum Core 95 > 98

Adamantine Adaption 139 > 144

Strider of the Unbending Path 113 > 119

Gravitic Wrestler 129 > 133

Silhouette > 101 (Skill Evolution Reached)

Skill Evolution: Silhouette (Adept) > The Creeping Void (Master)

The Creeping Void 101 (Master)

The Silhouette hiding Shiv’s Revenant form filled with absolute pitch black darkness, rendering him extremely noticeable. The eyes of the entities snapped to him immediately, and Shiv cursed silently as he thought that he resembled a splotch of black ink on the world. 

But then the darkness continued to spread. It spilled out from him. It painted the space around him and kept growing. The crawling darkness exploded out from Shiv and thickened into an opaque miasma that just kept building as long as he willed it. And to Shiv’s pleasure, he could perfectly see through the darkness despite its unnatural thickness. The entity, however—

“WHAT IS THIS? CAN’T… CAN’T SEE ANYMORE? WHERE? WHY? NO LACK OF LIGHT ELUDES MY EYES—NO! NOT DARKNESS. VOID. NOTHINGNESS. HIDDEN IN ABSENCE! ANOTHER MONSTER SKILL-SOUL-SHAPE-POWER! WRONGNESS!”

Shiv reached out and drained the entity. It channeled beams out from its eyes. Beams of discordant color, beams of searing energy, beams of time, and more. But it couldn’t see Shiv, and with each passing second, it was lost in the darkness. His darkness. The blackness that keep leaking out from the evolution of his Silhouette.

In seconds, the bottommost portion of Gate Theborn was clouded by a shroud of impenetrable blackness.

Once again, this was more concealment than outright stealth. When he used this skill, his enemy would generally know where he was. But generally wasn’t good enough for the entity to track where Shiv was, to notice that he just hatched out from a resurrective cocoon at the base of its present-time body, and was in the middle of launching himself up and away.

Blastwaves of force shook Shiv as the entity began to slam instance after instance of itself down upon the world. Gate Theborn smashed around blindly in Shiv’s Creeping Void. It was like watching a blind man try to crush a cockroach. It could vaguely hear him. It could feel the air he displaced while flying. But most of its eye beams still slashed wide and unfocused.

But once more, quantity proved a quality of its enough. All twenty-six entities unleashed a devastating display of unknowable colors from all of their eyes. Even wrapped in an impenetrable darkness, there was no way for Shiv to dodge the attack.

Conventionally.

He shifted out of context. The beams tore the space he occupied. Reality twitched and disfigured for a moment as another place beyond Gate Theborn slipped through countless rifts. A place that clawed at Shiv’s very sanity to witness. But then it receded as the entities quelled their gazes.

“What… what happened… Why darkness… What is… Sense disturbance in future-time-not-past-present. But why here? Missing pieces from… Don’t—not something in past. Would know if something tried to change my pas—”

And then a series of corrosive arrows tore out into Shiv’s darkness. Twenty-six arrows descended. Twenty-five struck nothing. One inflicted the first actual instance of damage the entity ever suffered.

It struck as a splash of Necromancy bit deep into its eye and withered the glowing oculus. Black substance erupted out from the entity in a hissing spray as it stumbled. It’s body, mostly a mass of colossal moving fingers, twitched across the ground as it shrieked in abject misery. The song of its shrieks tore at Shiv’s mind, and he emerged from his Vitae clutching his skull.

But he was still trailing a flood of void-black miasma wherever he went. Though the darkness that spread across the base of Gate Theborn started to thin and fade, the space above was consumed by a veil of unknowable black.

“HURTS? HURTS! HURTSSS!” The entity raged. The other version it sported similar wounds on their eyes as well. And that’s when Shiv realized they all still shared a soul. More Necromancy arrows tore across dimensions. The entity barely avoided getting hit again by shifting one of its pasts selves over to take the hit. Shiv corrected his assumption. The past self that was hit burst apart into dissolving Chronomancy. The present entity flickered back into place thereafter.

And then there were twenty-five. Twenty-five time-displaced eldritch entities left.

Huh, Shiv thought. He began crashing his fists together as he built up momentum. He shot past districts of Gate Theborn and bit back a groan of displeasure. Most of the district were utterly destroyed. Much had been torn down during Shiv’s battle against the entity. Only a scant few bridges and a few dangling platforms remained, but the buildings they carried were mostly rubble anyway. But in the distance, near the surface gate, he saw massive crowds of people huddled around the few remaining buildings in this place—thousands of people all packed together.

That looks like a sizable chunk of survivors. At least some people got away. Godsdammit. Every time I fight here, someone dies. And now, he was starting to suspect that it was the system’s will to reap mass death and carnage. Is this enough felling strife for you?

Shiv speared high into the air. Below, the entities struck blindly, channeling their gazes through the Creeping Void he left in his wake. Soon, the middle of Gate Theborn where the districts and people once lived were drenched in a shroud of nothingness. But Shiv never stopped expelling more darkness. Without it, he would have likely been dead again. With it, his temporal shell full regenerated, and Shiv had a moment to start preparing.

He reached into his cloak and stared assembling a new set of armor around himself. He also recreated something from his broken memories. “Cancer flail,” Shiv grunted to himself. “I need… I need a cancer flail.”

As he did this, he tried to find Adam—but the Young Lord was nowhere to be seen—Shiv spotted a few dozen mana strands undulating blindly within his shadows. “U-Uva,” he muttered. “Right… She’s… a Psychomancer. I think.” He pulled himself toward the mana strands just as one of the entities blasted up into the air, barely missing him.

“WHERE? SHOW SELF! SHOW! SELF!” It sounded more frustrated ever than before.

Shiv just let it pass. He hated the damn thing. He hated eldritch bullshit. He hated all of this. But he needed a plan of attack. It was too big, too fast, too strong, and its Chronomancy was stronger than his as well. Pair that with how it's nightmarish voice slashed at his very mind, and Shiv was done throwing himself at this thing in futility. He required a plan—an idea on how to kill it for good. But his mind was still all kinds of injured.

Thankfully, he wasn’t the only one here in this fight.

He had companions.

***

Bowslinger 98 > 99

Tactical Overseer 81 > 82

Mark of the Seeking Clairvoyant 103 > 105

Necromancy 2 > 3

Adam kept firing. He kept firing at every violet imprint on the world. He kept firing at all the things his Mark of the Seeking Clairvoyant highlighted when he first infused his Divination mana into the Recollector. Just receiving the details about its existence slashed at his mind. He kept getting flashes from its perspective—a perspective split across twenty-five instances of its personal chronology as it just kept…

Kept…

It kept bloody blinking out from his awareness. It was in one place and then another. There was no rhyme or reason to where it was going or where it was going to appear next. And there were still twenty-five of the felling things. He couldn’t tell which one was the original, or if there was an original, or if they were about to skip across time or whatever other nonsense it kept pulling. And the more he focused on it, the more he tried to pull apart the details his Divination was feeding him, the more his mind broke, and the more Uva had to put him back together.

By this point, Adam was shooting Necromancy infused lightning arrows at every single entity—wherever they appeared. His perfect awareness of the entities’ perspectives and locations allowed him to guess where it was about to arrive in a strange way. It wasn’t like precognition—though a lot of Diviners sold themselves as prophets. No, it was like being able to read casual patterns. Except Adam was only semi-literate due to never truly practicing the art and only experiencing theory at the academy.

So. He solved that with quantity. More arrows. Arrows always. So many arrows that he was straining his Dimensionality mana for the first time.

The surrounding space around Adam shuddered brightly with violet imprint. An entity was actively searching for him, rising high through the air while still being lost in that… unnerving, impenetrable darkness that kept growing across Gate Theborn. 

“Shitshitshit!” The Young Lord cried. He fired an arrow in a random direction and then flew across the rift desperately. The shuddering and sudden perspective shift superimposing itself over his mind usually was the skill’s way of hinting to Adam that he needed to run. He emerged ten kilometers away, and he saw the space which he occupied come ablaze. A massive shockwave spread across that section of the gate. A swell of plasma dissipated thereafter, but Adam could feel the heat even so far away.

Through the ionized air was a violet imprint of an entity that continued screaming its hate for Shiv, for Adam, and its need to keep Uva as a vessel. The Young Lord sighed. “Have you found him yet?”

Uva’s threads were spread across the district. She lost track of Shiv the moment he and the entities began their confusing time-brawl. After that, both he and Uva only caught a flicker of Shiv as he accelerated past the entity, missing it entirely for some reason before plunging into the demolished base of Gate Theborn.  Adam considered tracking Shiv, but that required him to shift his Divination mana out of the Recollector, and he wasn’t going to do that. Not a chance in all the hells.

“Uva?” Adam said. More perspectives splashed over his. The entities were groping blind through the darkness. Where did that bloody darkness even come from? He couldn’t see through it with his Seer of Horizons, and the sounds within were distorted as well. But he could still hear. But that was ruined by the entities singing their damned mind-rending songs, and so—

The space around them shuddered. Adam fired another arrow above the mana core. Time to reposition again. He hissed as an overflow of information tore something in his mind. The entities’ perspectives briefly overlapped with his—the entities were all frustrated. They wanted to break and destroy everything. But they couldn’t. They had lost a few of their past selves. And now the entity needed to drain some time from the survivors of the gate because it was dissolving before the rules of this dimension.

Past or present is like space to it, causality whispered to Adam. You can take a step back and forward. It can do the same. With time. And so time here hates it. It burns within our existence. Without a vessel for it to endure, it is constantly being flayed by the passage of the present against its wishes.

Adam groaned as he clutched his head. His Divination was trying to show him even more, but it was too much. Even with Uva’s help keeping his sanity tethered together, it was too much. Too much for him to process. Too much for him to understand. Too much—

“I think I found him,” Uva declared. One of her mana strands shuddered as if a fishing line that just hooked something. “Or maybe he found me.”

A moment later, Shiv’s mind rejoined theirs. But ominous, the swelling darkness drew closer as well. Then, Uva drew some of Shiv’s near term memories, and Adam realized source of the darkness had been the Deathless all along.

“Master-Tier Stealth,” Adam commented to himself. He couldn’t help but laugh. Of course the bastard got another evolution from this. “Godsdamned, but I’m relived it was just your Skill Evolution for once, Shiv. I thought the damned Recollector were doing something to bring it about.” 

Shiv’s thoughts came slow and wounded. “I… I think… I don’t… Do you have a plan? It’s hard to think about certain things. Hard to focus for long. But we need to kill this thing. We must kill this thing.”

A heavy surge of anger came at the end of Shiv’s thoughts, and Adam flinched as he tried not to remember Shiv’s screams earlier.

Adam flinched. “Right. A plan. Well. I managed to corrode the tower I had you drop earlier on the third gateway. I managed to plan the Graven Cage inside the severed elevator shaft. If we can get the Recollector across—”

“It’s too felling big,” Shiv grunted. He burst out from the top of the Creeping Void and flung himself at Adam. He was armored again, with a bone adamantine kukri in one hand and a cord—oh, good, of all the things this brain-damned bastard remembered, it was the cancer flail.

Shiv pulled back with his field as he came to a sudden halt beside Adam. “Too big,” Shiv gasped. “And there’s too many. It’ll just move across time. It can…” He let out a groan as he lost his words. “It… The past is… It can go there. It exists there too. I can’t keep it pinned easily. And then… your Necromancy was the only thing that hurt it. It took out one of its eyes.”

Just then, the space around the shuddered violet again, and Adam bit back a hissed breath as his mind struggled to process what he was seeing. “People…” The entities were going up. They were screaming about— “They’re coming for the people. The survivors. They’re running of out of their own time. They need to bind themselves to new vessels.”

“Desperate,” the Dreamtaker laughed. “Most do now have the soul-size-power-shape-integrity to bear the Recollector. They will break. It will only get a few more past selves from them.”

“A few more!” Adam cried. “We can’t deal with it now. What the hells are we supposed to do against more?” He fired a Veilpiercer that placed them directly over the surface gateway. Adam growled. His Dimensionality was starting to strain. He didn’t have many Veilpiercers left in him.

“It needs the Seeker. Or the unbreaking one. Won’t stop until it gets them. Otherwise, it dissolves for good. Gone-dust-time-flayed.” The Dreamtaker chuckled. 

Adam just grimaced. He felt through the dimensional pathway, and Shiv followed.

“Adam,” Shiv said. “I… I can face it. I can confuse it with my darkness. Make it get lost. I can fight it across time with my Chronomancy. But I can’t protect the people from it. I can only die stalling it. Until it burns away. Or it breaks all of us.”

The Young Lord’s heartbeat quickened. How were they going to beat this damned thing? Even if he had infinite Dimensionality mana, or a method to… To…

And then he looked at Shiv. And he remembered how Shiv managed to ward off the Educator—and the forgotten Ascendant she was tied to.

“No!” Uva snarled. “No. Do you hear me? No. That is not acceptable. We will not do that.”

“Do what?” Shiv muttered. He stared at Adam’s arrow for a moment, and slowly, through the broken ruins of his memories, he grunted. “Oh… That. But the blast might kill everyone here. I’ll do it but—”

“No,” Adam said, speaking to both Uva and Shiv. “I don’t want to use you. I’m still going to use the core. The entity exists across time, but it always has a version of itself in the present, right? So… so, I bring the cage back over. And then I open the gateway to the surface while the people cross. Then, we distract the entity. We keep it here and conduct a gradual fighting retreat to the gateway. Before we leave, I’ll fire an arrow and destabilize this cage. It should set the Animancy Core inside off. But we need to be gone when that happens.”

“We’re destroying Gate Theborn?” Uva rasped.

“Yes,” Adam growled. “And then we’re fleeing.”

“Over to the surface? Where the light-curse will kill most of the people here? Or me, if I don’t remain hidden deep in your mind at all times?”

“What other choice do we have?” Adam cried. The air around Adam shuddered with violet mana. They needed to move again. “Godsddammit. We can…” Adam looked at the Abyssal Gateway. It was so far away, and there was nothing connecting it to the Surface Gateway anymore either. And there were still over twelve thousand people left alive in Gate Theborn. Twelve thousand crowding around the Surface Gateway. He just didn’t—

Adam paused. His head snapped to the mana core.

Shiv snarled. “They’re coming. I can see them. They’re going for the people. I’ll buy you some more time. I’ll back if—when I… I find a way back…”

“No, listen,” Adam said. “We’re going back to the original idea. It’s good that the entity is going for the people. It will get close to the Surface Gateway.”

Shiv paused. Uva was confused too.

“The Jealousy,” Adam breathed. “The Jealousy could be teleported into Gate Theborn through a gateway! And the gateways are connected! By the mana core. I don’t have the mana to move the Recollector. I barely have enough Dimensionality left for another ten Veilpiercers. But the mana core does. Shiv. Go. Spread your Creeping Void over the people. Keep them alive if you can. Uva! I need—”

Her strands were already shooting down toward the survivors. “I know. But you should be there in person before them. It will make your Gate Lord Synchronization faster if they can see you and hear you.”

“Right. Shiv. Distraction first. Then, We need to somehow ensure the Recollector’s present-period body touches the gateway. So I can teleport it across to the Vulketh Gateway, and then we need to… to stun it somehow, so it doesn’t just slip back across time. Or use one of its past-selves to avoid harm.”

“Then after he finishes distracting the Recollector initially, he should cross over to the Vulketh Gateway first.” Uva concentrated. “His shadows… it was enough to confuse the entities. They’re lost inside his darkness.”

Hope exploded inside Adam. “And we can use it to hide the cage.”

Shiv grunted. “Good. We have… we have a plan.. I’ll go and…” 

His words died on his lips as Adam embraced him. Shiv blinked. Adam pulled away after less than a second.

“What… why?” Shiv asked, confused.

“Because you’re my bloody hero, you big, broken bastard,” Adam smirked sorrowfully. “I’m just sorry you broke yourself for me.”

Slowly, Shiv laughed. “I… will do it again… In a heartbeat.”

And then, something shook beneath them as the Recollector’s many selves began to shriek. Shiv spiked his field down and vanished from Adam’s sight. No more words. No more time. Just a desperate plan, and little else unsaid.

“You too, Hero Uva,” Adam murmured as he aimed a Veilpiercer where all the people were. Darkness exploded out from Shiv, and they screamed as it fell over them. Adam loosed his shot before the people were swallowed by Shiv’s Creeping Void. “Thanks for keeping me together.”

“The honor is all mine, Hero Adam. Now. Let’s go kill something far beyond our power.”