96 (I) Hunt [I]

Mixing different ingredients and methods of preparing them also modifies the effects you can gain from a specific dish. Let’s go back to the basilisk. Because the basilisk is a pretty cool creature. I can cook it straight and eat it straight. Usually, that’ll just kill someone who doesn't have Master-Tier Toughness if I don’t prepare it right—the venom glands it has are very interesting. As is its venom projection mechanism. I got into the—

Okay. That’s for the Biomancy notes instead. Not here.

But yeah, if I prepare a basilisk right, I can get a lesser regeneration boost. It’s practically like a lesser healing potion. Except, unlike a lesser regeneration potion, it doesn’t come with that much risk of cancer at all. Actually, I tested it a few times, and it seems to reset the body to a non-cancerous state. Basilisks are felling awesome. Seriously. Great big beautiful monsters.

But then I prepared it with mendules, and it ended up giving an enduring memory buff as well. It's like the effects mix and merge. I think this might be an effect of my cooking mana, but it makes different effects mend and merge together. Mendules induce calm and trigger a flow state. They affect your mind. Basilisks are all about regeneration if you get them right. Hydras even more so. Now, with all that put together, you get some pretty cool stuff going.

And we’ll get to hydras later, right now…

[Cook first; write more later]

-Draft Excerpt of Deep Delicacies and Exotic Delights, Written by Shiv

96 (I)

Hunt [I]

Shiv looked on at the strange geometric entity. As the shapes of the Aberrant Fractals spiraled and twisted in along their own angles, they merged into a strange tesseract that simply kept folding in and around itself. And as Uva finished releasing it from the sigil, she reformed her body and let out a breath. Thereafter, she retracted her mana strands from Shiv and immediately cast them into the thing she'd just formed using her flesh. It froze in the air just centimeters away from Shiv's face.

He blinked at it. He could feel a strange ringing noise coming from the very edges of the being. It also curved his perception, making the area before him seem further away one second, and then impossibly close the next. Looking at it stained his mind, but more importantly, it was highly uncomfortable for Rose to behold, judging by the noises she was making.

As Uva let out a stressful breath, Shiv's mind was still reeling. His thoughts felt like they were reattaching to each other slowly. His awareness jumped constantly. He lost track of seconds and then minutes of time. As he finally steadied himself, he found Uva stitching herself psionically into the eldritch being. Strangely, there was a slightly hypnotic quality to the way it slowly danced.

Now fully merged with the entity, Uva spoke to Shiv using the very vibrating resonance it possessed. “This is a thing born of aberrant geometries, of incomprehension of spaces. Madness sustains it. It cuts through things by getting thinner, but looking upon it does things to one's mind…”

A savage scowl crept over Shiv’s features. “And that’s the other reason why Adam isn’t here, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said. “It would hurt him to perceive more than most.”

“Yeah. And the System wants you to use it against him in the future, is my bet.”

Uva didn’t reply to that comment. She didn’t need to. By now, they both knew what was looming on the horizon.

She controlled it, and it flew through the air in a most unnatural fashion. Parts of its bodies, the lines, the folding edges, splashed out or speared forward. For a moment, he thought it might be something created from strange spatial magic, but it was entirely different from that. As it slammed down into the base of the anchor, it shredded through the dense metal in seconds and kept hewing deeper and deeper into the earth. It was like watching razor-thin blades glide through stacks of paper.

But slowly, its vibrations and shape were becoming more and more erratic. It was beginning to crack, its edges coming apart. "The madness will not sustain it much longer," she said. And then she extended it straight, its angle long. The world distorted before Shiv, and he suddenly found his perception filled by an intensely magnified view of split metal.

Broken Moon, this thing would give Adam an aneurysm and put a hole through his eyes or something.

Then, a thought came to Shiv. "Have it cut me," Shiv said. She paused. "We want a test, right? I got a Woundeater ready. Have it try to cut my arm off." He held out his left hand.

A note of utter disbelief entered Uva's mind, and she let out a snort. "I don’t think this is necessary. I have already demonstrated its capabilities against the teleportation anchor.”

"I'm just curious what it can do. Come on, don't be a chickenshit."

His casual insult caught her off guard. A sharp, pitched laugh came from Uva. "What did you just call me?"

"A chickenshit," Shiv repeated, prodding her mind.

"Oh, you're treating me like Adam now, is that it?" Her mind filled with vicious aggression and cold focus. “Fine. I’ll give you your cut, Deathless. Just don’t do me the indignity of screaming. I heard enough of that from you today.”

Shiv shuddered at the danger in her voice. Gods, that’s hot—

The Aberrant Fractal zipped into him. There was no warning. Just a sudden rush of movement. He followed it easily enough, but it was still jarring.

He felt a momentary resistance as his bone armor squealed. Parts of the geometric abomination broke from the impact, but others followed. Angles curved harder and became so thin that his adaption failed to keep up. They slit through his armor and then through his flesh, severing the limb entirely in but a moment.

Shiv let out a slight, annoyed hiss as he watched his arm fall off. It thumped on the ground. He blinked. “Hm.”

“So?” Uva asked, slightly concerned but mostly interested in the performance of her new skill. “How was it?”

Stolen from NovelBin, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Shiv picked up the arm. He frowned at the limb and then cast a Woundeater on himself. A moment later, he had a new crystallized wound to examine and eventually memorize. Wonder how different dismemberment and lacerations are. But more importantly, the geometric abomination was a powerful creature. As he regarded it, it shattered apart, each of its fractals twisting in different directions, and Uva's mana strands reformed, weaving her body back into shape. Her shield materialized beneath her, and she stood unevenly. He caught her before she could fall, wrapping an arm around her waist, and she leaned against him. She was spent in mind and flesh from using the ability.

"It taxes…” Uva swallowed.

“It's okay, take your time," he said.

"It taxes the mind to control something like that. The way it moves, it's unnatural." But she held up a hand, and she warped some of her fingers. She made them reach out, extending impossibly far in a strange direction, then she flattened them.

Shiv blinked. "Neat trick. I can think of a few uses for that." She lightly slapped him on the chin. He grinned.

"The cut—the Aberrant Fractal—can rearrange itself. It is a physical thing, but the angles it embodies are so thin… It slips between the cracks of even the hardest material. But more than that, it can hide inside a mind. It can hide and slip through pores and more. I don’t know if it was the Dreamtaker that desired me to have this ability or the System.”

"Yes,"

"You're the other Outsider. I heard you a few times while Uva was in my mind. What the hells are you?"

"Not so different from the Stranger, but then again different in the ways that mean much to you. An Outsider. A creature of fascination, colors, desires, needs, wants. You have strange dreams, Unbreaking One. Dreams of blood, food, sustenance, taste, yearning for family."

Somehow, the eldritch entity’s understanding of people seemed at once extremely comprehensive but also somewhat confused. I suppose we're as alien to it as it is to us. But then he reconsidered that statement. Probably not nearly that extreme, though. It parses and understands us after a few seconds, but we don't understand it. I barely figured out how the Recollector works, let alone the Stranger.

"Regardless, I have a window through, a window to here, a window to the Integration, and new eyes to gaze from."

"Those are her eyes," Shiv said, a growl entering his voice.

"Would you come to the Outside if I ever meant her harm?"

"I'd do a hell of a lot more than that," Shiv said casually.

The Dreamtaker moved on from that line of dialogue as if it didn't matter at all. "I have a few other desires. Want to be with all of you. Favored of Favored. Ruin-blessed. Battle-damned. Want to see where you go. Expand. Gaze upon your world. Many dreams. Many unique colors. Yours known, not known to me. So, I will keep my realm close to her gaze. I will allow some of my New-dreamt to enter. They will come through if they want to. If they like what they see." And then the Dreamtaker began to laugh. It was a discordant giggle that turned into a shriek and ended with a low sigh.

"And why did you help us anyway?" Shiv asked. “Isn’t the Stranger one of your kind? Is this some kind of god struggle between you two?”

"Help you? No, help myself. Stranger is the reason we are losing more of our dimensioned self. Place. Home. To the System. Stranger reached out too far. Was too greedy, hungry, gluttonous, foolish, careless. Reached in, and was infected first, infected the rest of us."

"Infected?" Shiv said.

"Infected true-regret-happy-joy-sad-rage. We were free, truly patternless, no shape, no identity, just feelings, awareness, intelligence, unbound-unbound-unbound."

"Unbound by what?" Uva asked.

"Consciousness."

The Outsider’s words turned into a hate-filled scream at the end.

"Our shapes colonized. Our natures colonized. Were not always like this. Emotion. Identity. Anger. All new. All to fit its desires, but not completely. Still at bay. System’s Periphery. Want to look into you, to seek your dreams, but no, NO, it's not my original way. Even name was given. No, it's not in my nature. No, it feels wrong. WRONG. But I am already changing. Too late. Can only slow. Stranger. Stupid, angry child, foolish. Bastard? New feelings. All these things. He reached out first, reached out too far, touched the Integration. Integration reached back, spread through him. Lured him? He gained skills, a first skill, and the System's touch spread, reached out, and now all of us are being contaminated by the narrative, by legends and stories. System categorized us as something akin to gods, but we are not. We are NOT. Not what we are. Nor what we were. Were other. But slowly then we will become, because we cannot resist. We are infected by the Integration. But the Stranger is furious. He wants to remain, hates the System's touch, but he wants power at the same time, but he doesn't want to bend. Cannot rule. Cannot be this way. He isn't this way. He was not this way. He. Was not a He. Wasn’t even They. Was It. Was something beyond words. Like us. Like me. Was not a She. Now, slowly losing ourselves, me and him and others, slowly being molded into shape…”

The Dreamtaker's way of speaking was confusing, chaotic, and her tone grew more frantic as she went on. But from what Shiv could parse, she and the Stranger had both been non-thinking entities, perhaps intelligent in some way, but without personalities or a true character. Now that was being forced on them. Shiv didn't know how to think about that. He couldn't even imagine what it was like to not have a consciousness.

"And so the Stranger thinks he decides, but he also does not. He decides because he is the shape he took after the System placed its skill on him. Slowly more mana will spread, slowly infection/Integration will spread, slowly Outside will become Inside. Don't want this, but want this at the same time. When I slip, when my mind-focus-thinking-awareness slips, I return, I struggle, I fight. But now, now I am increasingly more like, like, like…" And the Dreamtaker trailed off for almost a minute before it finally said, "…like you, like all of you. Pattern-thinkers. Pattern-made. Pattern-shaped. Even before the System arrived. When we first saw your forebearers, so long ago. Also pattern-made.”

“Our forebearers?” Uva said, confused. She was as lost as Shiv through the conversation.

"Not you. You did not exist. You are a mutation race, twisted race, fuse-race." She didn't understand. Neither did Shiv. "Before Integration were humans. Were Machines. After Integration, humans and machines remain, changed, but remain. But humans got far before Integration. Reached far, reached deep. And humans made the same mistake the Stranger did."

"What the hell kind of mistake was that?" Shiv asked, unnerved.

"Got the System's notice. They went beyond a boundary. Beyond a technological limit they should never have. And so STRIFE was provoked. But now…" And then there came a flicker within Uva's eyes. For a moment, the colors dimmed, and Shiv just saw a strange, twisting series of fractals there. Not so different from the Aberrant Fractal to some extent. There was also the color of her original eyes. A deep, dark blue layered upon the eldritch depths of the Outside.

"Must leave now," the Dreamtaker said. "Will remain partially. Gaze through you. Must leave. System noticing. System will seek to change more. Will deny. I must deny. I must deny. And I want to change at once. Change faster. See what lies on the other side. Madness. Beautiful madness…"

As the Dreamtaker’s presence receded, Shiv let out a deep sigh. "Uva. I don't know what to say, but I’m sorry for the fact that me being what I am did this to you.”

"This is not your fault." She lifted an eyebrow. "Shiv, I don't think you inflicted anything upon us. We decided to come with you."

"Yeah, but…"

"But the System would have made victims of us anyway. One way or another. We may not have become favored if we hadn't encountered you. But it would have tried to strike at us either way, one day or another. It wants conflict. It demands it, no matter what it takes. The only difference would have been time span and scale. And besides…” She ran a hand through her short hair. There was a streak of color there, cleaving down the middle. That color was constantly changing, coursing like a colorful river as it transformed again and again. "This seems more palatable."

"It does?" he asked.

She looked at him, and something twinkled in her gaze. "It is quite the thrill to deny chaos, to be calm and constant and enforce your own order when the world collapses around you. To stand before calamity and prevail." And there was that thrill inside of her again, the quiet need, the quiet urge to overcome what the System pitted against her.

He grinned. "Well, at least we're having fun, right?"

"Yes," she whispered. "Fun."