75 (I) Praise

Ambient Mana Stability Threshold

The maximum amount of mana that a dimension or designated mana zone can stabilize and process before its localized environment collapses into a state of volatility and chaos.

Localized imbalances in Ambient Mana Stability usually result in mana storms or the creation of gates. The Ambient Mana Stability Threshold also determines the theoretical soft limit for an individual Pathbearer’s Tier or a mana core’s categorical capacity.

Beings that exceed a designated mana zone’s Ambient Mana Stability Threshold will typically cause severe and drastic damage to their own skills and their local mana zone whenever they use a skill of an excessive Tier.

This will result in a rare instance of direct and extremely vulgar System intervention.

Advancing an Ambient Mana Stability Threshold requires years of accumulated conflict for a designated mana zone, or an incursion Quest between multiple dimensions or worlds that will see the defeated side’s mana and history fully absorbed.

So far, Integrated Earth has prevailed in three separate Incursion Quests…

-Encyclopedia Apocalyptia

75 (I)

Praise

Valor shuddered as every piece of his fragmented being was spat all over the floor of the teleportation anchor. His skull flared with flame and Necromancy as he felt his limbs again. An outline of his original body flashed, and he rose, manifesting a corrosive blade that he intended to ram into the one who ambushed him.

He had been painted into a book by the adversary—the Educator. Barely High Adept in power, he didn’t even see the brush and the paint before he drowned, and then he found himself inscribed into a page—conscious but trapped in place. It wasn’t the most existentially uncomfortable he had ever been, but it wasn’t pleasant. It was like suffocation, but he didn’t even get to choke.

While he was imprisoned, however, he deduced several things about his enemy.

The first was that he was fighting someone godlike

And finally, there was the presence. Even as a broken, diminished shadow of himself, he could still sense the jagged presence of an Ascendantby way of his near-crippled Animancy Skill. Where the souls of the Composer and other true divines sang with a steady pitch and offered a sense of solidity and stability, an Ascendant’s soul felt like it was filled with jutting shrapnel that constantly clashed together. Valor shook his head. Gods. Most of them weren't even Legends before their so-called apotheosis. And this Ascendant was especially damaged. A shell of herself, much like Valor was.

But for the undeath of him, Valor couldn’t recall a goddess that painted and drew among the Ascendants. If it was because the information was lost with his other soul fragments, or if the Ascendants had inflicted another act of mutilation upon history, he couldn’t tell. The part he did know was how dire the trouble they faced was, and that his disciples faced a hopeless struggle before them.

They were Masters and Heroes. System-favored. But gods existed beyond the bounds of the System and invested their powers upon champions for a reason. Gods—and sufficiently powerful beings in general—were disruptive for places that had lower mana stability thresholds. If one were to fully manifest and make use of one of their skills, sections of reality would likely collapse, and the System itself would intervene by Quest or vulgar incident to ensure the perpetrator was driven away.

This very well might be the reason as to why the Great One lay slumbering in perpetual half-death. At least that was Valor's hypothesis.

But even without unleashing their full power, a god could channel portions of their divine might through artifacts and individuals that bore their favor. And a portion of even a Legendary-Tier Skill was quite the potent thing.

But as Valor scanned his surroundings to discover just why his great adversary had released him, he was shocked to find himself still in the teleportation anchor. And that the Educator was a smoking pile of flesh at his feet. The woman’s flesh bubbled and crackled, with only the white of her teeth still showing. Her robes were drenched in paint, and her brush and pencil were both cracked. The crystal badge on her shoulder had shattered as well.

Less than a meter away, the great tome that projected entire dimensions based on the illustrations contained within and had caged Valor, Siggy, and Can Hu was ablaze.

Why was it burning now? Why were they ejected?

The answer came to Valor intuitively. And he didn’t like his conclusion at all. Shiv. He must have deliberately or accidentally come into contact with Necromantic mana. But… To output so much energy that it destroys a Legendary artifact and incinerates the champion of god…

But where was Shiv?

Uva was seated on the ground with her back against a wall, her eyes wide. Dried blood marred half her face, but there was also a copious amount of paint spilled over her. Behind, her shield drifted, its twitching movements resembling those of a nervous man. Adam had a Veilpiercer nocked as he breathed hard and fast, one knee to the ground in exhaustion. His eyes were flaring, and Can Hu let out a mechanical groan against the wall beside the anchor’s exit. Siggy, meanwhile, had curled into a ball in the corner, muttering to herself.

But—

And then Valor sensed him. He saw the faintest shimmer of a person’s outline, but even that was fading fast. What’s more, there was a deep, corrosive scar that ridged Shiv’s Vitae.

“Shiv?” Uva cried out, recovering from her confusion. She looked around for a moment, and her strands immediately shot toward where Shiv’s Revenantwas. Her other strands reached out to most other members of their group. Can Hu, she simply called out to. As she knelt where Shiv was, her expression twisted from focus to worry, to open terror.

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“His mind is present but unresponsive,” Uva said. She directed a strand of mana inward as she began modifying her own mental state—to enforce more control of her spiking dread. Adam looked at her with an equally worried look.

“What does that mean?” Adam asked. He reached out where Shiv supposedly was, but grasped only open air. “Just control him and have him drain our vitalities a bit.” Adam paused. “That… won’t be permanent, will it, Valor?”

“No,” Valor said, willing to offer something of himself as well. “Vitality… It will recover in time. But why isn’t he responding? Uva?”

The Umbral’s expression hardened into one of pure focus. She sank several strands more into Shiv and pushed them deeper and deeper—

A wail tore out from her lungs. Uva’s eyes widened as she bit back a torturous shriek of pain.

“Uva!” Adam reached out, but she pushed his hand aside.

Out of desperation or raw tenacity, the girl pushed herself further into the maelstrom of suffering. Valor could read the anguish on her face, but she kept going. Her fists were clenched so hard that blood was spilling out between the cracks of her fingers.

“Uva…” Adam said again. “Is he still—”

“He’s there! He’s just not responding!” the Psychomancer shouted. “I just… need…” She bit her lip. “I've never seen this before. I don’t know what to do.”

Valor approached them, and he drew on what little of his Animancy he could. Once, he was capable of rebuilding broken souls. Once, he could create new entities entirely with enough focus and dedication. Once, he was feared by gods and titans alike.

Once.

Now, as he cast a sliver of pale mana into his favored disciple, he poured it into the corroded soul-scar and… felt it practically do nothing.

“Great Valor,” Uva gasped. “Please. What do we do? He is fading. I can feel him fading. I cannot—I cannot reach him through the pain. What do we do?”

Valor stared at the place where the Deathless was. The once translucent shroud of Shiv's Revenant was almost transparent now. And the Legendary Pathbearer felt more impotent than ever.

“I… don’t know,” Valor said.

***

Existence was pain.

Pain. Every part of Shiv was consumed by pain. His body was a husk and nest of pain. His mind drowned in pain. His soul was lined with pain. At some point, he went beyond constant, silent screaming. He considered going mad from the searing agony, but that didn’t help with the hurt, so he turned sane again. Through it all, a single thing kept him grounded, even as he felt himself grow colder.

Rose was crying. Crying from the pain. Crying from all she suffered. Crying from the stress of being here in this place—banished from the world and her family and bound to the child who was the cause of her and her unborn daughter’s deaths in the first place.

Every time he tried to comfort her, his focus broke. He warred against the hurt as best he could, but this was beyond anything he could imagine. He was at the point where he was looking forward to true death and blissful nonexistence, if only—

NO!

Something combusted inside Shiv. He fed rage into his Revenant Skill for the first time, and the pace of the creeping coldness slowed. If the System wanted him to go away for good, then it needed to inflict more than torture on him, because he was going to fight it here too.

Come on, Rose, Shiv gasped. Get up. We just… We need to…

“The pain…” she breathed. “So much… Why…”

Because the System’s a bastard and… likes it when we writhe. But I can be a harder bastard still. And you too. Get up. Get—

“Shiv!”

He froze. Someone was…

“Please! Please reach back! Please! I’m right here—don’t… don’t fade—don’t leave—you made me a promise…”

An echo of Uva’s voice sounded in his mind. And she sounded more terrified than Shiv could remember her ever being. And that was enough. Just enough to give him another push.

He felt… Through the ocean of suffering, he sensed Adam and the others. They were all there, gathered around him. He tried reaching out, but even with him fighting through the hurt, it felt like his body wouldn’t respond, that he just couldn't move. He fought to reach them, to drain vitality from one of them, but he couldn’t even tell where his hands were.

The flame of his life dwindled. A hollow coldness touched his very core. And Shiv realized it might have been too late. Even with his Feat, even with all his skills, it might have been too late.

He thought about his life as he struggled, as true death closed in. He thought about everyone that hurt him. The War Priest. The people of Blackedge. Roland. Tran. And he thought of Georges, who was the closest thing he had to an actual parent. He thought of Adam, who went from someone that despised him to whatever the hell they were now. He thought of Uva, of her mind, her touch, her focus. He followed the strands of her Psychomancy still, even as he wondered if it was all for naught.

“It’s okay,” he managed to send to her. “It was… I enjoyed it… All of it…”

And he felt her pain. The pain she felt when her mother died. Like something inside her was being torn out slowly, despite her best attempts to stay composed, to endure the hurt. And it wasn’t just her pain, but Adam’s too. He blamed himself. Adam always blamed himself. For everything. And he would never forgive himself if Shiv perished. From Valor came the flavor of bitter impotence, of a man who remembered mending souls in far worse condition than Shiv's as easily as stitching a wound, but who was now broken himself.

There was no loss like losing oneself, and a Legend among Legends had further to fall from the heights of who they were than most.

“Pathbearer,” Can Hu said. “Endure. Persist. Climb.”

Selfishly, Shiv found himself proud. He didn’t realize his death could ever hurt someone so much. And that just made him try harder. He reached—

Someone took his hand.

But it wasn’t Uva’s vitality he felt. Nor was it Adam’s. Or Valor’s. Or Can Hu’s.

This hand was strong, and the vitality that flooded Shiv was an inferno beyond comprehension. Shiv cried out as the hand grew—and closed tight around his entire body, his entire soul. The left side of Shiv’s entire being radiated with hurt, but he forced himself to focus.

Stranger yet, he could feel the hand tightening so much that even time itself halted its flow. His friends froze, and they blurred into the background of his awareness.

He focused on the dense, thick hand that clutched all of him, that allowed him to drain its vitality. Shiv looked up, and he stared. He stared across dimensions. He stared beyond the veil of his world, his reality, to somewhere else entirely, at something else entirely, at a place unreachable. The being that held him was no person. For a moment, Shiv's heart dropped as he thought that 811 had found him, even beyond the grave.

But this wasn't 811. 811 was positively tiny compared to the titan that currently clutched Shiv. And 811 was an insect next to this being's vitality, this being's power. Its body consisted of fire. Constant, blooming, bursting fire.

It was the fire of Pyromancy, the fire of war, the fire of burning bodies. Beyond the pyre that composed the great beast's insides, its skin was a river of scars. The layered tissue snaked across its flesh, painting mass graves and brutal wounds that co-mingled into a grand canvas. A grand canvas that composed an orc unlike any other. Its eyes, however, were bright and clear. They were like gems in the sky. So pure that Shiv couldn't even look away.

The Challenger wishes to offer you their congratulations.

And then the orc smiled as it looked down upon him.

“Come on, Deathless. IT’S JUST A LITTLE BURN. Nothing to be writhing around about.”