II-20 Wounded

The best way to handle a Greater Demon is with an army behind you. You want to know what makes something a Greater Demon? A Greater Demon means that they are at least Master-Tier in approximately three to four skills. Three to four. You want to know the difference between an average master-level Pathbearer who has one skill and someone who has three to four? It’s absolutely colossal.

When I first became a Master of Geomancy, everything changed for me. Before, I had to work with a group of other engineers to build a bridge and keep it stable. As a Master, I learned to rise a fortress out from the mud and the soil with a few spells. When you become a Master, its like going from an empowered mortal to a demigod. The effect went double when I fused my Geomancy with my Physicality.  I went from an extremely valued, but also extremely protected and vulnerable mage, to someone who was a basically walking fortress. 

It changed everything for me.

It also made me an arrogant ass.

When you have four different Master Skills, they come together. They come together and make you different. They give you choices that one who has a single Master skill will never receive.

Now apply this to a Greater Demon. Most demons are already designed for war. Their biology and instincts are more optimized for combat and fighting than your usual human or even automaton. They can be the size of a small mountain. They can be capable of moving at extreme speeds even without any skills boosting theme. 

Of all these things, however, they can also be extremely intelligent.

I remember the first Greater Demon I engaged. It was a Jealousy. A colossal being of strength but also Psychomancy. And it taught me an important lesson. It taught me that even if my physicality and my Geomancy were at Master-Tier, even if I was far stronger than most could ever dream to be in their lifetime, that there were skills I wasn’t even Advanced. There were places where I couldn’t hope to match. And there were Masters beyond Masters. 

I dropped a mountain on it while the rest of the unit bombed it with artillery. My wife had cut off all its arms, and we had it pinned in place—were just waiting for it to bleed out. Stupid mistake. It massacred us in return. It projected itself into the mind of a cockroach hidden inside the mountain. And that cockroach came out into our camp that night as we were waiting, drinking, reveling. We were not prepared. I was not prepared. I lost an arm. My wife lost her legs. Many of my brothers and sisters lost all.

And I never thought I was invincible again…

-Memoirs of a Master-Tier War Mage

II-20

Wounded

Shiv stared down at the mess of slaves with extreme suspicion, and the few among them who were uninjured, or recently healed by his Woundeater, stared back. Within one of them had to be the Greater Demon, but he didn’t know in which, and he didn’t even know where to look. 

Most of them were still glowing, painted with that faint, ethereal luminance his The Chef Unwavering skill used to mark ingredients. The Jealousy was still alive. And Shiv was overwhelmed. He briefly considered using his own Psychomancy to examine each of their minds before he quickly rejected that idea. Whatever damage he suffered from the prior mental assault must’ve left him slightly incoherent still. To try doing that, to dip his mind in one of the slaves while Jealousy was still in them was tantamount to suicide. It would have ripped his consciousness in half the moment he drew close.

“Did everyone see it?” Shiv cried.

The slaves jolted back in fright. Most of them were still caught in the throes of panic and terror. Shiv reduced his Dread Aura and asked again. No response. He rested as he observed the massive group, letting his Biomancy recover, letting his muscles relax. Using both his gravity field and Woundeaters had left him strained in more ways than one, and the fight wasn’t over yet. It also allowed his gauntlet and mask to mend a bit as well.

If the Jealousy wanted to hide, Shiv was going to take advantage of that, to be ready for the next round when it came.

He regarded, the sales once more. They all seemed biologically stable, with some being badly injured. It wasn’t healthy for Advanced and non-martials to be trapped in a cage while a Five-Master-Skill Pathbearer fought a Heroic-Tier monster. Plenty weren’t moving at all, and Shiv suspected the Jealousy couldn’t jump into them since they didn’t even have active minds.

“Did anyone see it? Did anyone see it jump into someone’s mind?” Shiv called out once again.

For a moment, there were only incoherent stammers, stutters, whispered exchanges, but no answer. And then, from the crowd came one clear voice, ringing like a bell. It was the girl from earlier, the one who spoke to him, the one too divine to break.

“I saw something,” she said, holding up a hand. She was curled in the corner, pressed against the wall like a ball. It was telling how relatively uninjured she was as compared to the others. Slowly, she pawed up along the wall and pointed to the corner of the room. “I saw… I saw a rush of something down that way. The monster flashed in the air once and then vanished.”

That didn’t help too much, but at least she gave him a general direction. She pointed at the upper middle of the room, and there were a mass of a few hundred clustered slaves there. The walls behind them were dented and drenched in the black blood of the Jealousy.

Dots of gore and fallen debris had left people splattered in small islands, but most of them were huddled together, packed in tight, like cattle in a slaughterhouse. Tension built inside Shiv, spilling down inside him like an overturned hourglass at each passing second. These slaves seemed normal as well. He didn’t know how the Jealousy managed to hide its mana fields so well. Perhaps that was the major benefit of having a Master-Tier Stealth Skill. 

The Umbral Shadowalker skill Shiv stole couldn’t hide his mana very well, and that was another reason why he had been discovered while hiding among the containers so many times—why he ended up just ambushing people over and over.

He dragged himself over the slaves as if he was a marionette hanging on a wire. He hovered and bounced as he constantly “threw” himself up in the air over and over again, bouncing up and down unevenly. It wasn’t perfectly stable, but good enough for surveillance. He narrowed his eyes at the slaves, and there was a building feeling inside him-. Shiv frowned, and focused. The feeling grew when he looked in the direction of a certain slave. He realized the feeling was Foreshadowing aiding his search—

An attack struck Shiv. Not from this group of slaves at all. A spear of hyper-accelerated water crashed into his back, and he didn’t even see it coming. Couldn’t even hear it until the last second. As the hydrokinetic blast impacted him, he was briefly unbalanced until he pushed back with his gravity field. 

He gripped the stream of surging water, seizing with his strength, and wrenched it aside. The blast that was crashing into him broke apart at an angle. He turned around, expecting to see the Jealousy somewhere, but it wasn’t. He just saw masses of huddled slaves, all of them wailing at the sudden burst of violence.

And then, another attack came from directly below. Shiv reacted to this one in time—twisted down by shifting his center of gravity via Gravitic Wrestler. He punched the rising jetstream of water just as it was about to hit him. His field blasted out with his punch, carrying the fullness of his might against the coming impact. The water slashed through the air, piercing the sound barrier, but it broke like glass against his fist, and a shockwave splashed against Shiv’s protective veil of gravity. Several groups of slaves were knocked down, but he’d been far away enough that they didn’t sustain any significant injuries.

Shiv rose higher into the air, keeping all the slaves in his sight. The Jealousy was taking potshots at him, firing the moment he was focused on one group in particular. To make matters worse, his Foreshadowing was quiet.

Godsdammit, the big bastard’s planning to chip me down through ambush after ambush. Or they can wait me out and teleport out of here. I thought I was going to fight a monster, not a felling weasel. And, well, there’s an easy thing I can do. It’s kill all the slaves. But I don’t want to do that. I don’t think I can do that without hating myself. I wish Adam was here. Can’t believe I’m saying that, but Adam might have noticed something with his stupidly powerful Awareness…

But Adam wasn’t here, and Shiv needed to resolve his own problem. He wasn’t going to be able to fight the Jealousy in a brawl if he couldn’t find it. Because it had a Skill Fusion between Stealth and Psychomancy, it decided the terms of the battlefield. Shiv might be able to break a small mountain over his knee with his newest Skill Fusion, but it was only useful if the enemy was physical and within reach. And now it wanted to play an elusive game, fight careful and smart. 

So now he had to counter it by getting smarter too.

Okay, okay, so here’s what we’re going to do. It’s trying to ambush me. Well, I need… I need to present myself as unaware. I need to bait it out, to track it down. Keep thinking there’s something I could be doing…

Shiv considered how he was going to do that. And then he realized the Greater Demon was using confusion against him, confusion he could use right back. He reached into his cloak, and pulled out two more bodies. He made them twitch and move, as if he was instilling life in them with a dramatic flourish of exaggerated Biomancy. Instead, he was simply moving them around, forcing making their limbs flop wildly to give a semblance of life. He dropped the corpses, and They crashed down among the slaves, not hitting anyone. The bodies twisted and jerked, their empty eyes wide and their drooping mouths bouncing as he used them as puppets—puppets he tried to disguise as investigators. 

Some slaves screamed as the dead shivs bounced around and glared lifelessly at them.

Dread Aura > 67

Shit! I just keep scaring people I try to help!

From above, Shiv stared, his focus unwavering. If only he had something that could… Shiv cursed himself as a fool. He already had a solution to his problem, even used it earlier, but cut it off when he drew upon his second Feat, using his rage to fuel his Gravitic Wrestler skill. 

The Song of the Vigilant. The Blessing he got from the Composer could solve all of this. It was something that could keep his focus from ever breaking, but also something that revealed all things around him in a resonant web. He used it to detect Adam in the distance during their spar. Now, as the song played out, it washed over every slave, outlining them in a texture of vibrations, and then it also outlined the once-hidden shape of a massive tentacle slowly gliding from mind to mind.

The damn Jealousy wasn’t just hidden, it was constantly moving as well.

“There you are,” Shiv laughed, looking directly at the Jealousy. The man who was currently infested didn’t even know he had a mountain-sized demon inside him. In all other manner, slave seemed to be entirely normal. He had scratches, a burst eardrum, but nothing specific that would give him away.

But now Shiv knew, and his Foreshadowing made his suspicions twice confirmed. But this brought him to the second part of his problem: what was he going to do to pull the damn creature out? If he rushed in close, it would likely attack with both Hydromancy and Psychomancy. Failing to deal with either would result in his summary death and mental sundering.

Once again, Shiv looked down at his Magebreaker and arched an eyebrow. For something that size to be compressed within a mind, it must be using a lot of mana, concentrating all of its energy to keep itself hidden. If it was that much mana, he might just be able to strike it with his Magebreaker.

And so, he hovered languidly for a while, gliding through the air, pretending like he didn’t know what was happening. He even directed his surveillant corpses to search in areas away from the mind-infested slave. But then, in an instant, everything changed. He shot down with a pull from his gravity field, spiking towards the ground. He descended like a falling bomb, but the moment he reached the mind-infested slave, Shiv pulled back hard, coming to a stop before he briefly tapped the man on the head with his Magebreaker. 

Shiv was rewarded with a most satisfying collision. His gauntlet rang, enduring a severe magical impact. It went from relatively calm to shrieking, a frequency so high that the pitch was grating on Shiv’s ears. A second later, the Jealousy burst out. A flood of Psychomancy detonated free from the slave’s mind. To Shiv’s sorrow, it killed the slave. The man’s skull burst apart, unable to bear the sheer power rushing out from his mind. But the deed was done: The Jealousy was exposed.

And Shiv was on the monster in a frenzy of violence.

“How?” the Greater Demon screamed, but it didn’t have a moment to consider that question—because Shiv promptly punched it. Instead of driving his fist in the Greater Demon’s as if it was a dagger, Shiv’s gravity field spread wide across the entity of the Jealousy’s body. A massive wave of force ballooned out, crashing over every square centimeter of the creature. The Jealousy reared back, a blast wave rippling along the edges of its form as Shiv shouted, exerting every ounce of his force to hurt the damn creature.

It was launched back. Driven into the titanium-reinforced hull of the anchor. Hull that curved and folded inward with a wail of succumbing alloy.

A stunned groan came from the beast. As its massive limbs scrambled. Shiv parried one into another and rushed forward to continue the fight.

Striking Proficiency > 29

But Shiv wasn’t just going to beat the hell out of this monster physically. He fueled his Biomancy with his rage. Wounds opened all along his body, and he fed them into a Woundeater. He slammed the wyrm into the Jealousy, and it detonated in a colossal splash of crimson mana. He could feel its Magical Resistance sundering, just like how its huge eye were bloodshot and bleeding from that punch.

“Out, away, back!” The Jealousy unleashed a messy wave of psionic force. It was unfocused and messy—a spell composed quickly. The attack didn’t damage Shiv’s mask or gauntlet, and he just kept his violence.

One of them was going to break by the end of this, and it wasn’t going to be him.

Undeterred, he surged forward, lancing his gravitic field into the Jealousy with a punch, and further causing the metal walls to cave. Between his colossal strength and its immense weight, the anchor was deforming.

Gravitic Wrestler > 106

His next blow struck the eye again, outright rupturing the corner of the Jealousy’s cornea. Blood gushed out, parts of its carapace cracked, and then Shiv sank his fingers into its eye and pulled with his gravitic field. He felt optical cords inside the demon draw taut; heard the fear in its mind as it screamed.

“No! LET GO!”

The Jealousy, however, remained devastatingly strong. The creature swatted at him with its limbs, smashing into him twice at different angles. Shiv found himself knocked loose and launched up into the air. His head rang, but his armor endured. He stabilized himself with a pull on his field. But then, a jet of Hydrokinesis was already coming at him—a jet that he used to feed his Momentum Core to fullness before he batted the stream aside with a contemptuous backhand.

Parry > 47

Shiv’s blood was pumping, his muscles surging with gravity-enhanced power. He came at the Jealousy, his Momentum Core thundering with power. But the colossal beast had no interest in a physical contest, even if it had the strength to engage in one.

“Away,” the Jealousy cried again, and once more, a shroud of darkness enveloped its entire being.

Shiv cursed. He launched another bone drill out from his cloak, and then another. Two of them speared into the dark, and he heard the Jealousy cry out as it was struck. But with his Song of the Vigilant active, the resonant web splashed into darkness, and there, Shiv watched on in awe as he saw two things. 

First, the Jealousy wasn’t hit at all—it just pretended to be to mess with his mind. The second was how the Jealousy seemed to disintegrate—its entire body shrinking, turning into a mana needle. He recalled the Psychomancy spell from earlier. The spell it used to detonate the slaves and use their exploded minds as bombs. 

So that’s how it slipped past him before: a truly flawless conversion between Stealth and Psychomancy, turning its immense physical bulk into nothing more than a thread of Psychomancy mana.

The sheer ridiculousness of the feat made Shiv chuckle in disbelief. If this was what a heroic Pathbearer was capable of, I couldn’t wait to reach this tier myself.

Shiv slammed his fists together, draining a final hit of momentum with the blow. His field magnified his clashing knuckles, and colossal shockwaves swept out from him, shaking the world. His Momentum Core filled. Time slowed. Shiv discharged and blasted toward that thin sliver of mind-matter.

This time, it was the Jealousy that wasn’t ready for him. He crashed into it, his gauntlet coming down as if a falling hammer cast from the heavens. The impact hit the Jealousy hard. Its body rematerialized from the thread of mind mana and crashed against Shiv. He felt its Hydromancy and Psychomancy fields sweep over him, but without the focus crystals, the beast was stunned and distracted.

It grew more stunned still as Shiv laid his hands on it and started working its joints. He seized the nearest limb and twisted the place where the connective tissue met the Jealousy’s body. A sickening snap tore through the air as the Greater Demon screamed—no coherent thoughts accompanied the scream, only misery, only pain.

As it tried to recover, Shiv yanked hard, his gravitic field enveloping its eye. Blood vessels tore as the corner of the massive organ gave way and the eyeball came free, dislodging from the socket. With a primal cry of extreme effort, Shiv burned the last of his rage and used every ounce of strength to fling the Jealousy against the wall. His gravitic field crashed over it in a tsunami of overwhelming force.

The beast wailed as it was hurled backwards. Its body struck one place, and its eyeball hit another, barely connected through via the optical cord. Shiv then smashed into again, overstraining his body before his Toughness could adapt. 

The effort came with its own cost. He felt every muscle tear from the bone; he felt his bones creak and start to break. But his Adamantine Adaption kept them from shattering outright, and his ligaments held. Still, the damage to his musculature was severe—severe enough to feed another Woundeater.

Thus came his second attack. As soon as the Jealousy slammed into the wall again, caving in another section of the anchor, Shiv dropped a fist brimming with crimson mana onto the monster, infused with the power of his wounds. 

Twin explosions swept over the Jealousy, swallowing it in crushing waves. The first was the gravitic field channeled outward by Shiv, burying the demon even deeper into the folding titanium. The second was his Woundeater. It snaked out and detonated his wounds against the Greater Demon. The inside of the Jealousy cracked and its eye snapped free entirely. Shiv could feel its Magical Resistance was about to give.

As it tried to swat him off again, Shiv pulled ripped it off the wall and broke its balance. His muscle damage entirely healed thanks to his Wound Eater. He slammed it against the wall again and immediately began pummeling it, launching countless blows. Each of his fists, elbows, and knees hit like falling artillery, a cascade of devastation. Massive blast waves of force tore across the Jealousy, as its blood-filled socket spewed an ocean of red down upon the slaves below.

Striking Proficiency > 30

Blood gushed out, its bones shattered inside, as Shiv concentrated his gravitic field into thin-points of pressure. The Jealousy struck at him, but Shiv yanked the Jealousy along the wall, throwing it off balance every time it tried to stabilize and get a good hit on him. He was relentless. What sloppy hits it did land fed his Momentum Core, and he found himself on the verge of another discharge. With an ascending elbow, he sent of the Jealousy up down the wall away from the slaves, and then he discharged—plunged into the beast’s socket.

Shiv opened new wounds in himself and fed another wyrm. Another crimson explosion washed over the Jealousy. Its Magical Resistance was crumbling; his Biomancy felt like it was being flayed from his soul. Shiv retracted his gravitic field, focusing entirely on himself. He speared into its flesh, punching deep like a harpoon. Once more, he swam through the creature’s insides, gouging and ripping inner flesh. He was stronger this time, and could move everything that he touched. He pulled out bone daggers, carving and slashing, launching bone drills out at every angle. Shiv hunted for vulnerable organs, and when he could find none due to the demon’s bizzare biology, he kept sawing, gouging, and slashing, each attack enhanced by his field.

Knife Proficiency > 39

Spear Proficiency > 11

Every punch struck the Jealousy as if delivered by a rival colossus; every slash fell like a titanic blade cleaving deep through the monster’s flesh. Shiv felt his soul ache, and the strain of the Composer’s song wore on him. His focus wouldn’t last much longer, but he still had this—he was going to finish this fight. His Woundeaters devoured new injuries he inflicted on himself, and a series of crimson detonations erupted out from the Jealousy’s eye socket.

The Greater Demon howled in pain, healing as fast as it could, but it couldn’t dislodge him—not when Shiv was this strong, not when he could anchor himself in place, becoming his own leverage. He grabbed the Jealousy from inside itself and twisted every bone he could feel until they snapped or dislocated, until the demon screamed in higher and higher agony as Shiv ignored his own muscles ripping free from his bones once more.

He slammed it against the wall again, and as his Momentum Core hit capacity, he discharged dragged the Jealousy’s shattered form socket-first along the surface. Its massive eye was now little more than a blood-filled pond lined with viscera. Its Magical Resistance shattered. Shiv caved in his own eye sockets and transferred the wounds into it. The pond erupted as if a volcano of gore, flesh spraying outward as his wounds became its wound.

Biomancy was beautiful: once you broke your enemy’s Magical Resistance, you simply told their flesh what to do, and their flesh obeyed. Jealousy tumbled across the insides of the anchor in whirlwind of torture.

“Need—need to break free! Strong! Fast! Inside me! Break free!” the Greater Demon cried with horror. Its body was still healing, but Shiv slammed it into the wall again and again, breaking its focus each time, keeping the Jealousy from focusing on a spell.

Shiv was tired—beyond exhausted. His soul felt raw as he tried to crystallize another series of wounds for a spell, but he snarled in focus-breaking pain as the Song of the Vigilant became too much for his soul to bear. His mana field gave immediately after—his Biomancy practically as torn as his muscles were.

Shiv didn’t stop. He didn’t care. He would burn himself down to cinders to kill this thing.

The Deathless gathered what remained of his strength and began punching the Jealousy from the inside. Every blow was a sledgehammer against a caving wall; every hit like a small mana bomb. The Greater Demon was flagging. He was going to break it—tear  it in half.

Shiv gripped it along its middle, and he roared, pulling in two directions. His field penetrated the center of the Jealousy, curving along opposite angles. As if a colossus of unimaginable might, he ripped the demon down the middle from above: its inner cartilage popped, massive ligaments and dense tissue strands snapped.

Shiv’s muscles teetered on complete exhaustion—he didn’t know how much more he had. But the Jealousy was going to be torn apart first. That was the only outcome Shiv could accept. A splash of light came from above as he ripped open the upper half of the demon. Shiv hissed and groaned; he could barely think—he was so exhausted. But he refused to stop. The Jealousy screamed and cursed, begging to be released, but he didn’t relent. He would rip it apart, even if it killed him—especially if it killed him.

But the Jealousy lashed out unexpectedly. Its remaining limbs smashed into the slaves below. Shiv felt them, his wounded Woundeater field picking up crushed bodies in his periphery. He used the rage born of the Greater Demon’s final atrocity to feed his Gravitic Wrestler Skill. The demon was torn even more, most of its insides were exposed to the light, with just a bit more effort—

Gravitic Wrestler > 107

Shiv felt that sudden tug, that rip, the water leaving his body—and once more, he perished within the Jealousy. Without a body, he had no gravity to wrestle with; all he had was his mangled Biomancy, his gauntlet, and his other magical skills.

Shit! he thought as his mind reeled. He had overextended, consumed by bloodlust and rage, and suddenly he noticed a focus crystal plunging into the Jealousy inner flesh. The demon had speared itself, impaling itself on the broken fragments it once clutched as handholds.

“Get loose! Get loose!” the Jealousy cried, its mind ragged with pain but held together by sheer concentration. It mustered its fury, and called in an implosion of Psychomancy—Shiv parried the attack even as he felt his gauntlet crack. Then, the Jealousy launched a salvo of others into itself—hasty spells that bombarded and ripped through its own mind. But it did the work. It cracked Shiv’s gauntlet more, and the blows he couldn’t block mauled his mind.

His consciousness reeled. Shiv screamed voicelessly. He drained the Jealousy’s vitality as fast as he could, adding to its wounds. But it had focus crystals embedded deep in its flesh, binding shards of the material as implants—and that was enough. The Jealousy unleashed another psionic attack, a concentrated slicing blade that mutilated its own mind just to strike him.

It hit him; his gauntlet fractured in half. Four hours—that’s how long Leu said it would take for a still-intact gauntlet to repair itself. And Shiv couldn’t put his mask back on before he resurrected.

He fell through the final stages of his cocoon, but it wasn’t quick enough. The Jealousy, launching another sloppy, hastier attack, and Shiv’s sense of self nearly broke apart.

As soon as he resurrected, he attempted something truly desperate. He drew on the Song of the the Vigilant and his Biomancy again. Unspeakable pain tore through him—he fought not to black out and maintained his focus. He burst open his inner organs out from his chest and cast a final Woundeater into the Jealousy. A colossal detonation of crimson mana followed, but he felt his soul tearing in half.

The song ended; his mana field partially ripped itself free from his soul. Shiv exploded back out into the world in a wave of disemboweled tissue and mana. But the pain was too much. Something inside him broke. He blacked out, soul pain overwhelming even his subconsciousness. Darkness and silence reigned.

He didn’t even feel it when he crashed into the ground.

When he suddenly woke, he groaned and retched, laying in a pool of blood among a mess of whimpering slaves. As he looked to his left, the Jealousy lay slumped against the wall, groaning weakly. It was brutally injured: its eye gone, its body ripped nearly in half, its insides spilling out in a mudslide of viscera.

Both of them had broken the other. Both of them were ruined.

It tried to strike him with Psychomancy; he felt the mental blows, but the demon lacked focus and strength. The Jealousy tried to move a limb, but it flopped and wept in telepathetic misery. Shiv tried to rise, but a surge of pain coursed through him, and he blacked out again. When he came to, everything still throbbed with agony. Mana strain was one thing—this was another level. Both his soul and mana built on each other’s torment. Shiv almost started praying for true death to come take him.

He tried focusing on Pyromancy, flinging a flicker of flame at the nearest limb. It sparked uselessly against the cracked carapace—but it roused the demon. It shifted—over two hundred meters of slumped carapace and blood.

“You’re alive? Why? What are you? Why won’t you die? What’s wrong with you?” it hissed.

Shiv gritted his teeth, barely forcing out the words. “Because you’re eating people. Because I need to get past the gateway. Because I’m not done...” He started crawling toward the Jealousy. “I’m not done until I tear you in half.”

The Jealousy let out a human sob of sorrow and absolute exhaustion. “Just go away. You are broken, too. Both broken. Need rest. Stop fighting.”

“No,” Shiv growled. “You’re not dead, so I’m not done.”

He got halfway to the demon before pain overwhelmed him. He blacked out once more while reaching for the Jealousy.

When he awoke again, he saw a ragged boot beside him—belonging to the slave girl who had noticed him earlier. Her eyes were wide with worry and terror. “Are you… are you alive?’

“Pull me closer to the Jealousy. I need to… finish the fight,” Shiv rasped.

After a beat of hesitation, she tried to drag him but couldn’t budge his weight. Shiv glared at the demon, helpless as it recovered. If it healed fully before he could rip the damn focus crystals, he was done.

“Help!” the girl cried. “Someone help! Move him—he needs to be near it!”

The other slaves cowered in fear. Shiv’s frustration boiled over into anger—and with anger came strength for his Feat. He fed it into his gravity field and exploded off the ground. The girl stumbled back, surprised. Shiv, still wracked with agony, flung himself into the Jealousy as hard as he could and plunged into the slick, hot warmth of its inner flesh. The act was too much. He almost blacked out again.

The Jealous screamed—but it was roused. Roused and desperate. Shiv could barely focus as it gathered another spell—and this one started dragging at his mind as well. “Need to escape… need to hide.. Hide from… monster… hide from… terror…”

Shiv tried pushing against the Jealousy, but could. The pain was so bad…

The spell was cast. A twisting, winding rush of Psychomancy collapsed his mind and the Jealousy’s together. Through his agonized thoughts, Shiv realized they were traveling, that they were in the psionic needle the creature could create. Then, they struck something, and Shiv found himself tumbling in a hellscape of fractured memories and kaleidoscopic thoughts.

Is this… is this someone’s mind? A slaves mind? As Shiv tried to get his bearings, the Jealousy cried out, sensing him, reaching out to seize him.

Both of them were broken, mutilated, and fused within the same psionic needle. In the Greater Demon’s haste to escape, it failed to notice him—and brought him along. “You! Still here! See you! Berak you!”

Shi— Shiv thought. He tried to grab the monster, but this was a place of memories and thoughts. And he was no Hero here. He wasn’t even an Adept. The Jealousy struck his mind with its last flagging force—Shiv howled in agony as his psyche shattered like jagged shrapnel.

He could barely speak or remember who he was. All he knew was pain—then he felt the Jealousy burrowing deeper, tearing him in half mentally as he had done to it physically.

“Tear me now, pathetic creature,” it taunted. “Tear you first.”

Shiv tried to fight back—but his Psychomancy was a raindrop hitting a broken mountain. The Jealousy was still a mountain here. Still a titan.

He wasn’t anything at all.

Despair almost consumed him—almost.

But Shiv was a pillar that would not crumble or break without a fight. He reached out, entwining his mind with the demon’s, pouring his final fury into his Psychomancy, and then he bridged his agony with the Jealousy’s as it ripped his mind open down the middle. Absolute, nightmarish misery consumed them both.

They screamed—their egos superimposed over each other in shared wails of torment. The suffering seemed to go on for an eternity, but in the end, Shiv felt the Jealousy disintegrate around him, its sense of self breaking before the pain first. A burst of Psychomancy washed over him. Then there was physical sensation again. Light. And so much pain still.

He launched out of the mind-realm, falling against the cold, hard ground. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t—

Darkness, blissful peace, nothingness, beloved ignorance. T

his lasted a long while, a much longer while than all the whiles before. But finally… finally Shiv roused, roused with a whimper of pain as he felt someone touching him, something brushing his face. And then broken fragments came back to him. His mind was in pieces. He had been fighting—he was fighting something—his name was—he was fighting something—and he was… What was his name?

Shiv suddenly shot up to his feet, and he gasped, snarling at the shapes around him, his fists clenched in instinctive, animal violence.

Most of the slaves were far away from him. Most of them were huddled along the corner of the room, the ones that survived that was, the ones that were... He couldn’t count them anymore. The Chef Unwavering was gone, and even if it was still there, he didn’t think he had the focus to…

The girl was in front of him. She had been touching him. She was… was covered in blood. Everyone was covered in blood. And there were so many bodies. The ground was practically a pool… up to his knees.

Everything spun.

Shiv clutched his head and he groaned, and he took a step forward. He felt blood leaking out from his eyes, from every one of his orifices. He struggled not to vomit, and there was nothing in him to vomit anyway. “Where… where is…”

He turned. His insides plummeted. The Jealousy was entirely healed. But it wasn’t moving. It lay within a deeply dented portion of the wall. Some of the teleportation anchor’s spells were ruined as well, the pattersn looking wrong.

Their fight had been nightmarish. Of all the slaves that were in here, we should have guessed maybe only half were still alive.

But while the Jealousy was whole, while it had healed completely and even regrown its limbs, it wasn’t moving. It didn’t react. Shiv blinked. “Hey? Come on. Let’s… Still need to…” He realized it was dead. It’s Psychomancy was more broken than his Biomancy. It was mind-dead.

He felt it break before he did.

“You weren’t moving for a while,” the girl said. Her face was wan, her hands were shaking. “You screamed so loudly for so long that we didn’t want to go near you, but you weren’t moving, we thought you died. I came to check on you. I came to see if you were actually dead for good.”

It took him a second to even process what she was saying. He clutched his head again. Everything hurt, everything hurt bad. His body was battered, strained, exhausted. He didn’t even want to carry his own weight. He wanted to pass back out, to lay back down.

His hand was covered in, he stared at the gauntlet on his left hand. It was still cracked, but pieces were slowly shaking, slowly coming back together. Shiv looked at the slaves, and he looked at the Jealousy, and then he stared down at the blood pool, and looked at himself. The remnants of his inner clothes were in tatters. He looked wretched, absolutely miserable. Even the silhouette spoke of pain and exhaustion.

He stumbled closer to his enemy, the Greater Demon. He stumbled closer, expecting it to attack him at any time, to finish this. Eventually, he reached it. He reached it. He placed his hand on it, and now he was operating entirely by instinct. Entirely. He was searching for something. He was searching for… He saw his old corpse on the ground beside him. A body clad in an armored skeleton. A body that still had its helmet on, that still had its mask. He walked over. He peeled off the helmet and took the mask. It was still intact. Nearly broken. But still intact.

“That’s…” Shiv’s eyes rolled. He nearly dropped right then and there. He collapsed with his back against one of the massive beast’s tentacles, and he just sighed. As he lay there with his eyes closed, just drowning in his own suffering, he asked the girl a question. A question that had been bothering him in the backdrop of his consciousness.

“Hey, you… girl,” Shiv croaked.

“Yes?” she said, her voice high and nervous.

“You… did I tell you my name?” he asked.

It took a moment for her to respond. “No, I don’t think you did.” 

Shiv chuckled. “That’s not good. Because I can’t seem to remember it either…”

And then, once more, darkness took him.