Practically every Pathbearer knows that breaking something is easy, but building it back up, or even making something new entirely, is harder than hell. I appreciate this more than anyone else because, even though I am a War Mage, most of what I do is building and reinforcing. See, I love fortresses. I love building structures, making architecture. It was my life's dream. Would have definitely pursued it if things didn’t go to hell. Alas, I will have to settle for the consolation prize of making the greatest fortresses known to Integrated Earth.
And when it comes to rebuilding, there are few challenges greater, more taxing, and more rewarding than reconstructing a conquered gate from the inside out. See, it usually takes a lot of material, personnel, and firepower to take a gate. So much, in fact, that the words "mass casualties" and "90% infrastructure absolutely obliterated," along with "defenders slaughtered to the last man," accidentally happen when your Master-Tier Pyromancer overcharged his spell.
Accidentally.
Supposedly.
Probably.
On paper.
Functionally, you know that the Master-Tier Pyromancer was just throwing a bitch fit because he lost a special someone under his command, and now he's venting it on the remaining survivors. And then you also know that he's someone important's nephew, and even though you're a Master as well, connections mean a lot. Of course, connections mean a lot internally. And while your own side fucks you if you try to do the right thing, your enemies probably execute a bunch of their captives as well. Because guess what? They have connections too, and you might have just burned some of them.
But I digress. That's another topic altogether.
Rebuilding a gate from the inside. Let's start with part one: Temporary housing.
Now, housing is difficult. Frankly, let me rephrase. Housing is simple, but good housing is difficult. We've come a long way when it comes to our dwellings. We got all sorts of nice amenities: mana-sustained cooling, temperature control, the whole works. But if you need to hold people temporarily, all you need to do is have enough space, a few structures, quite a few rooms, a place for them to sleep, a place for them to shit, a place for them to eat, a place for them to be held as prisoner, and finally, a place for you to get rid of the dead.
This is part one. Part one sounds simple. It really isn't, especially not when you have to process a few thousand screaming, angry Pathbearers who all aren't so happy that you managed to take their city. And eventually, you need to get them out, because so long as you stay in place, and so long as they are regarded as the local population by the mana core, that gate isn't yours. Not until you elect a new Gate Lord. And then the rest of your problems start kicking in.
That is when we'll get to the fun chapter on mana decay…
-Memoirs of a Master-Tier War Mage
94 (I)
Responders
The group conducted a hasty retreat back up near the Surface Gateway. But then they found another issue to contend with: the infrastructure there was devastated. The shockwaves generated from Shiv’s battle against the entity had crumbled a lot of buildings past a certain height. As such, they immediately embarked on a rescue effort. Uva and Adam worked primarily to locate survivors, while Shiv proved a remarkably effective excavator thanks to his Gravitic Wrestler.
Tactile telekinesis was a beautiful thing, as was the ability to perfectly manipulate anything you could touch. As such, he managed to move tons of debris without ever shifting their weight the wrong way and causing further harm.
Without a Gravitic Wrestler, a lot more people would have died. A lot still died, and that was increasingly a theme with being a Pathbearer. No matter what you did, even as you strove to do the right thing, even as you fought as hard as you could, when Masters, Heroes, and more clashed, it was like a natural disaster. It was a special kind of hell being a Pathless or even just a lesser Pathbearer, and Shiv knew that hell better than most.
"And that's the last survivor I sensed," Adam said telepathically.
“Doing another sweep,” Uva declared. “Shiv?”
“Biomancy’s not picking up anything here.”
Shiv pulled a badly wounded slave child out from beneath a slab of broken concrete. She was lucky. There was a table caught there. It had snapped in half, but just enough of it retained its structure, pinning her below but not letting her be utterly crushed. Her legs were still mangled, and there was a horrible cut that had taken one of her eyes. Shiv cast a Woundeater into her, and then channeled the spell into one of the many bodies he left piled nearby.
The dead served another use for Shiv. They were repositories for his wyrms. The living, when they were badly injured, often needed immediate assistance. And the dead? Well, there wasn't much he could do for the dead, so he made use of them, including his own bodies. He hoped they would understand. But if not, well, that would be a problem he might never have to deal with, considering his nature.
As he strode out of the ruins, wearing a new set of bone armor, clutching a whimpering, gasping child to his chest, he stared at the terrified masses. Most of them had nowhere to go, and there wasn't nearly enough space across the entirety of the surfacer district to sustain them all, either. Of the few dozen buildings that had been here, only two were still mostly intact, and even they had large cracks along the walls, with every single window blown out. The rest of the district was made up of a plaza and a few large bridges that now led to nowhere. The buildings and other plazas they had been connected to were gone.
"Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!" the child whimpered and wheezed. Shiv's heart twisted. He looked at the gathered crowds, their densely packed bodies pressed together, their pale, tired, terrified faces showing just how fragile their courage was.
"Another lost child," Shiv said across his link. "No idea where the mother is. Didn't see her in the rubble. Couldn't feel anything with my Biomancy either."
"Place her with the others first," Uva said clinically. When she got focused, she got very, very good at compartmentalizing.
Shiv hovered up into the air and drifted over a few hundred meters toward a pin he'd constructed using his own adamantine bones. There, small tents he made from his skin decoy floated in the air. Inside, tables and first aid stations had been set up. While the mercenaries here were mostly slave runners and other unsavory Sell-Skills, they still had the martial discipline to obey orders and to understand the situation they were in. As such, their Biomancers volunteered immediately with some prodding by Siggy, and other Pathbearers with their own skills assisted in the first-response effort.
But even so, there was an aura of palpable dread in the air, an aura that constantly fed Shiv's skill.
Dread Aura 86 > 88
As people looked upon him, their eyes widened, their pupils dilated, their pulse quickened, and they always looked away. More than a few Pathbearers were High Adepts of Awareness and Reflexes. They had a guess about what he could do, about his potential tier and skills, and they told the others thereafter. Most of the weaker mercenaries avoided his gaze, did their best to stay out of his way. Some of the stronger ones let their eyes linger on him. One or two were Master-Tier, and they stared longer than most. But they, too, looked away, their courage crumbling as he glared back at them.
He knew what was going through their minds. He was, in a sense, a little bit like them. He had to be. To hunt all those lesser vampires as a Pathless, there was always the tantalizing desire to see if you could kill something far out of your league. But cold rationality blunted that animal desire. A Master-Tier was devastating, someone that could knock down buildings, someone that could cause massive civil destruction.
A Hero was a city breaker if left unchecked. And now, aside from Uva and Adam, Shiv was completely and utterly unchecked.
But that led him down to another, more perilous thought. Even though he could tear everyone in the city apart—and he had good odds of killing everyone if he mounted a surprise attack right now, if he used a combination of his Inertial Overdrive and his Strider of the Unbending Path—who was going to stop him? Who was going to make that wrong right?
And an answer came to him as easily as the sun was certain to rise in the dawn: Adam Arrow.
Another fragment of Shiv's mind snapped back into place, and he felt himself approaching full coherence again. He could indulge in deeper thoughts. And aside from considering why the System had unleashed so much torment on them, had forced them into so much conflict in such a short period, there was a realization.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
He and Adam were mirroring each other slightly. Their Heroic-Tier Reflexes were almost inverse. Shiv couldn't turn; he was an avalanche of building speed and force, destructive to the extreme, impossibly fast if given the time to stack his gravity spikes. But he didn't start that way. The one who started immediately faster and maintained that speed without any weight pressing on him was Adam Arrow.
Adam Arrow, who had a new Divination Master-Tier skill. Adam Arrow, who had been granted access to Necromancy. Adam Arrow, who could turn the azure dawn on Shiv if he deemed him vile or an adversary, if that was how The Righteous Dawn Prevails worked. Up close, Adam was fragile, but that was just the thing: Shiv would have to surprise Adam if he wanted to get up close. And he needed to exploit his temporal shell to maximum effectiveness if he didn't want Adam to incapacitate or, more likely, kill him instantly and irreversibly with his Necromancy. Adam didn't miss so much. His Veilpiercers traveled across dimensions and arrived in a near instant.
Everything about how the new Gate Lord was developing screamed counter: A silver dagger meant to slay a monster.
A monster that was Shiv.
I see the game you're playing, he thought, spitting his hatred and slightly sour admiration at the System. He did have a counter. His name was Adam Arrow. And potentially, Uva. But she now occupied stranger territory. Frankly, she was more of a danger and a predator for Adam than she was to Shiv.
If he managed to induce a berserk state in himself, she wouldn't be able to control him. More importantly, she was far slower, and she had nothing to use against his time magic capabilities. He might not be able to get to her easily in most cases, but between his Chronomancy, his Inertial Overdrive, and his other abilities, she couldn't respond to him very well. She couldn't come close to hurting him.
I see the shape of a triangle between us. A counter against a counter against a counter.
He placed the slave child down near the others, and a tall elven woman greeted him with a nod but didn't meet his gaze. The children flinched away, all bunching together in the corner of the room. Their small faces were painted with absolute petrification, absolute terror, and that clawed at Shiv's mood the worst of all. He didn't mind if his enemies were afraid of him. He preferred it if the martial Pathbearers here—the mercenaries, the guards, the deserters—were afraid of him. That instilled some measure of order, even without a naked use of force. But the common people, the innocents, for them to look at him with such scorn…
Godsdammit, he thought. I left Blackedge. I became a Pathbearer. I didn't want to go back to being like that. Yes, it was fear rather than outright disgust. Yes, he held a great measure of power, but he didn't want any reminders of Blackedge, especially since he was going to be going back to Blackedge really soon.
Shiv retreated from the medical tent as fast as he could, rising back into the air.
"Are you all right?" Uva asked him.
"I'm fine," Shiv replied. He wasn't sure if that was a lie. He was fine, better than before, now that his mind was almost completely healed, but he was still slightly bothered.
"Do you remember what I told you when you first arrived at Weave?"
"Yeah," Shiv said. "Reputations can change, and they can change pretty fast."
"With just a few deeds," Uva finished. "They know you as someone clad in the visages of death right now. They think you might be a Necrotech. That is a good thing. As long as we keep our role and allegiances ambiguous, they will have to keep guessing, and it will make them uncertain. Some of that may make you feel uncomfortable, and I understand why. But understand that sometimes a slight bit of discomfort goes a long way to cementing an enduring advantage."
And once more, there was that Uva pragmatism shining through.
"Six hours," Adam said through their shared telepathic link. His mind was beyond stressed. He had been casting a Seer of Horizons into the rubble, seeking any sign of life, anyone that he could still save. "Six hours… six hours, and 3,211 lives out of 22,000," he breathed. "22,000 people."
However bad Shiv felt, Adam felt it worse. And where Shiv's thoughts drifted toward the casual cruelty of the world and the existential misery of being a weak Pathbearer or, God-forbid, a Pathless, Adam took every death onto his ego. Every death was a personal affront to him, a failure on his part.
Uva jabbed him. She used one of her strands to spear deep into his mind and rattle him. Shiv felt Adam's sudden alarm.
"What was that for?" he cried out, his woes momentarily lost to him.
"No," Uva simply said. Her voice was gentle, but cool and firm at the same time. "You are not doing that. You will not reinforce this habit."
"What habit?" Adam snapped. "A habit in which we failed to save—"
"No," Uva interrupted him again. "There is a mixture of responses," she began, "a mixture of responses that one can have to this situation. You, Adam, fit a template of impossible perfection. And that perfection will ruin your performance. Do you understand me? Because you punish yourself for not achieving the most optimal result, ignoring all the facts of the world, ignoring your own limitations, you will break yourself down, and you will simply reach a point where you are incapable of even doing good. For that's how much you have eroded your own mental capacity with self-loathing."
Adam's resulting silence was a sullen one, and she prodded him again. "Fight it," she ordered. "I know it's not easy. I know it's counterintuitive. I know it is unlike anything…" She paused and rephrased. "I know that it doesn't feel right for you to just let this go. But you do not need to talk to yourself when you feel these ill feelings. Just let them be that, ill feelings, and tell yourself that you will use these ill feelings to do better, to serve these people. That, before anything else, before even Psychomancy, is the first lesson in shaping your own mind. You must control what you say to yourself. You must control what your own narrative is. If you cannot even do that, then you will fall to the whims of external forces and misfortunes every time."
Her tone softened, and he felt her do this deliberately, tactically. She knew how to talk to Adam, just like she knew how to talk to him. As she'd said before, the first thing the Psychomancer learned to control was their own mind, and she was giving him a lesson in progress.
"We have all experienced a tremendous ordeal," she said, and once more, she very deliberately revealed something else about her, about her own damage. Both of them felt her uncertainty, her terror, and she withdrew from them a second later. But the effect was achieved. A reminder that she too, was, like them, vulnerable and fallible. And she turned the sympathy to something she could use, something that Adam wouldn't argue against, that he could follow, and forged it into a means of harnessing their focus. "We can process what happened to us later. But right now, we need to finish setting up a temporary means of shelter for all these people."
"Yeah, she's right," Shiv said. "I kind of ran out of bone. I could die a few times and…”
"That would not be necessary," Uva said. "Can Hu has more than enough material to work with the garden and the ruins to scavenge from. The automata slaves Can Hu freed will be fine in this regard, but food and sustenance will be an issue soon. The agriculture district and the Hydromancy plant have been destroyed. They will need to be replaced.”
Shiv felt the urge to cringe. That's right. Can Hu was a Geomancer now. But more than that, Can Hu was a crafter. It knew how to build. And rudimentary shelters shouldn't be beyond the Penitent's capabilities.
Shiv pulled his gravity field. He shot high into the air and sailed to the top of one of the two mostly intact buildings. There, a small bunker made from a dense layer of alloy dotted the roof. And within, Can Hu, Valor, and Adam resided, monitoring the situation around what remained of Gate Theborn.
Gate Theborn. Shiv didn't even think it was going to be called that anymore. There wasn't much of Gate Theborn left. Practically no Vultegs alive either. If there were, he couldn't sense any. It was possible some had escaped back to their home dimension at some point, but he had no way of knowing.
His expression turned distant. He thought back to the Guardshead Leu, the suddenness of her death. How her revenge had only been half achieved. How he'd never know what her last words were going to be before the entity murdered her. And then he thought of her slugs. How proud she'd sounded when telling him all about them.
He didn't know much about her. And she'd been so consumed by her desire for revenge that she'd seemed like a shell of a person. But still, it had been a life. A life taken suddenly. With no chance for herself or anyone else to save her. She couldn't have anticipated it. She couldn't have known what was hiding within Confriga's sword, and nobody had the chance to do anything when it unveiled itself. He didn't have his Chronomancy at that time. More importantly, he wasn't nearly strong enough to face the entity head-on. Even if he, at his current stage of advancement, with his new skills, with all his power, was cast back in time to face the entity once more at the point where it had held her in its hand, he wouldn't be able to save Leu.
Quietly, Shiv muttered something in eulogy to Leu and her poor, dead slugs. "I hope your clutch-brother saw what you did from the after… if there is one," he said. "I hope there's something after all this for you. You gave a whole godsdamn lot for revenge. Centuries. Your whole life. Can't even imagine how that feels. But the System… It didn't care about you. But I did. I wish I could have cooked for you again. I wish…" Shiv drew in a breath. "I wish there was a chance for you to be a person in the end."
And Shiv sighed. "I've wished for a lot of things in my life. I'll make sure that you get a grave somewhere. That you're remembered for a time, maybe. But I promise that I’ll remember you, at least. That's all I can do now."
As he drifted toward the bunker, he heard a hum of approval from Uva. "It is the best you can do. It is good to be remembered after you pass."
Shiv still didn't feel it was enough.
"It never is," she replied. "When my mother died, the pain was raw at first. But what hurt me, what wounded me again and again, every day, was the absence. The death of all possibility. Our ideologies differ greatly, but there is a good reason the Necrotechs call it the Great Enemy. Death is… There is nothing. Nothing that properly encompasses what it does to the living. We have metaphors. We have stories. But an end? No return? No tomorrow? It is a dreadful thing."