90 (II)
Prevail
A massive Woundeater flashed into existence between Shiv’s hands. Its insides glittered with massive crystalline chunks containing countless lacerations. With a wild cry, he slammed it down against the Recollector. An ocean of red mana exploded out from the entity. Its fingers burst apart into pieces.
Another copy of the entity died. The others froze mid-air. A displaced series of shockwaves zipped across the airspace of Gate Theborn. A second later, Shiv watched Adam get blasted out of the sky by the entities’ sheer inertial displacement.
“HEY!” Shiv roared as his discharge ended. His broken bone armor crumbled off his body, revealing his battered, bruised, and bloodied form. “I’M RIGHT HERE, YOU GODSDAMNED ASSHOLES! COME AND GET ME!”
But to his displeasure, only two of the entities broke away to go for him. The other seven closed in on Adam like sharks racing against each other to taste the flesh of a wounded bird drifting on the ocean’s surface. Then, more emerged from the blackness below. He hadn’t stalled them nearly long enough.
Shit! Shiv’s heart thundered with desperation. He stopped time, and then immediately noticed his temporal brand bound to a distant entity. Well, at least that wasn’t a waste. His shell was halfway broken, so he only had five seconds to work with. Shiv cast his Chronomancy at the entity. He jolted across his personal chronology and exploded back into existence beside the entity, performing the very same cut he did earlier.
The entity flinched. Shiv’s temporal shell cracked, and through the gaps, he realized he was wearing an undamaged set of bone armor.Like he managed to make history forget it ever broke. More than that, he was feeling better too. His injuries were gone. And as he finished performing the cut, the anchor passed back through him. It rejoined the other temporal echoes and had ten points of history he could jump to again once more. Holy shit, I take everything back, System! I felling love Chronomancy!
The entity deformed under his cut again and turned its eyes on him. They began to glow golden, and Shiv hadn’t released enough of his Creeping Void yet. “AGH! STRIDER! ANOMALY! USED STRIDER OF UNBENDING PATH! DRAGON SKILL-UNNATURAL-IMPOSSIBLE! HELP! SELF-PAST-ME-METER-DISTANCE HELP!”
The entity’s words were breaking down to gibberish for Shiv. He decided to stop listening. He blasted it with a mana-dense laceration spell. The creature split into two with a scream before it could strike him with any of its eye-beams.
The beautiful thing about skills: You could never have enough of them to cover all your bases. And this poor bastard had no Magical Resistance without the sword.
Then, a rush of color smashed into Shiv’s back. He cursed and then cast himself two seconds back in time. His temporal shell shattered again. Shiv returned to real-time, oozing darkness from his body, but the Recollector’s other selves were already on him. He shifted out of context, and as they sang their terrible song, Shiv adapted by using his Biomancy to rupturehis own eardrums. He let out a bark of anguish and sailed wildly through the air with all equilibrium lost, but at least he wasn’t going insane anymore.
Aching coldness rushed through Shiv. He shivered. He'd shifted out of context a bit too much. His vitality was almost completely spent. Shiv emerged back into reality with a groan of effort. He cast a laceration at a nearby entity. Its body cleaved itself in half in accordance with the spell. Darkness congealed around him. The entities came forth seeking easy prey, but they lost track of their quarry as they passed into the dark.
Shiv tried flying without his ears for a second before he gave up. He had a wyrm eat his wounds and he flung it at another nearby enemy. The spell detonated against the entity, and it gave a cry of alarm but gave no other hint of pain or damage.
At least they weren’t singing anymore.
Woundeater 79 > 81
And then Shiv resumed his campaign of distraction and confusion. He swung his cancer flail out again. He struck one entity on the side, threw out another body, and launched two bone drills. The Recollector’s past selves responded instantly and by instinct. Strange though the eldritch being was, it wasn’t that clever of a fighter. It kept falling for the same tricks. Tidal waves of heat and force crashed into Shiv from all sides, shattering pieces off his armor. He didn’t care. He just needed to keep fighting until the mana core was synchronized to Adam.
Then, they could begin the next part of the plan.
Shiv spiked his gravitic field and shot toward the enemies nearest to the last surviving district of Gate Theborn. It was a small mercy; it seemed to have a one-track hyper-obsessive mind. Shiv prepared another laceration spell and groaned from vitality exhaustion. I’ll drain them before I kill them with my vitality. I don’t think I’ll manage to survive my next death otherwise.
The Challenger is watching.
Yeah. Keeping watching, you big bastard. I’m coming for you too.
The Challenger is laughing.
Shiv smashed through tides of force and plasma, dragged along by the entity’s body. He clenched his jaw as his armor burst apart. Vitality surged into Shiv—
For all of a second.
Another entity blasted out from the one drained and crashed into him.
The Recollector laughed cheerfully. “FOUND YOU!”
Shiv let out an exhausted bellow as he immediately started draining the entity he was pinned against. The eyes along the massive hand it had for a face flowed like debris on a river, and in its palm was a whirlpool leading who the fuck knew where. Pressed against the entity by the sheer weight of its acceleration, he felt himself get dragged along with its eyes toward the vortex.
“DRINK YOUR HISTORY! DRINK YOU IN DEEP AND TAKE YOU FOR THE STRANGER!”
Shitshitshit! Panic exploded inside Shiv. He tried to drain the entity’s momentum. His core filled immediately, and he discharged at the same instant he froze time. Shiv exploded off its body as it gave a frustrated shriek. All its eyes came alight. Beams tore out to greet Shiv. But he was already gone. He reverted himself back four seconds in time to his fifth temporal anchor.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Shiv blinked across the world—and found himself surrounded by nineteen different Recollectors all going in different directions. Most of them were still far from the last group of survivors, but it wouldn’t take more than a few seconds for the entities to reach the Surface Gateway. The damned entities just moved too fast. An entire section of Shiv’s temporal shell peeled away. Two seconds. Godsdammit. I need to lead them back down if I can. Keep them confused.
He released his Chronomancy. Several waves of crushing force smashed into Shiv all at once. He survived all that with mild discomfort and spiked his field down—then died as one of the entity’s clipped his head while phasing through another of its many selves.
“FELT! IMPACTED! HERE HERE HERE!” it cried. They swarmed and began blasting the space where Shiv’s corpse dropped.
The suddenness of Shiv's death caught him off guard as well. One second he had been alive, the next, well, he didn't even see what killed him. He only noticed the entity as it tore through him, unleashing waves of destruction as it continued to travel. It descended, and an entire group of other entities descended with it. They all launched beams from their eyes, cleaving and lashing at reality, pouring so much color down toward Shiv's corpse that they began to disintegrate the very foundations of Gate Theborn itself.
Colors from the Outside—from a place beyond Shiv’s imagination—tore a great wound into the world. That wound swallowed Shiv’s corpse. Meanwhile, the actual Shiv remained silently screaming, writhing in the air as a Revenant as he tore his gaze away from the entities.
"Killed him!" the entity cried. "Finally destroyed? Didn't want to destroy, merely, merely move. Where? Where?"
And then Shiv’s Revenant crashed into one of them again by pure chance. It was moving, and it didn't notice where he was. All the pitch-black miasma he left imprinted upon the world hid his every motion, and the fact that he was a Revenant made his presence even harder to detect. He felt like an ember that had been cast into a roaring forest fire, and immediately he drank deep, the vitality within the entity surging into him.
Shiv accelerated toward a new resurrection. The entity he struck writhed and screamed beneath him, alerting the others that this battle wasn't over. Notifications loaded before his eyes, and from within Shiv erupted a dense membrane of kinetic energy that layered his body with thundering shudders of force.
Adamantine Adaption 145 > 150
Woundeater 81 > 83
Gravitic Wrestler 133 > 136
The Creeping Void 102 > 104
Momentum Core 100 > 104 (Skill Evolution Reached)
Skill Evolution: Momentum Core (Master) > Inertial Overdrive (Heroic)
Inertial Overdrive 104 (Heroic)
Shiv felt his Momentum Core burst apart inside him. But instead of scattering, it spread out and suffused over his flesh and sheathed his very muscles and skin in what could only be described as a membrane of shuddering, thundering force. It constantly pulsed around him, even though he was still a Revenant, and he realized that his every motion distorted the friction in the air; made him move faster.
A shadowy cocoon formed over him. The entity he drained finally noticed his presence, and one of its eyes fell on him—too late. Shiv froze time. That didn't stop it from channeling a beam of accelerated time at Shiv. It also didn't stop him from casting himself back in time by the span of a second. He jolted out of existence for just a moment. Most of the beam missed, the remainder of it flaying away a small section of his armor.
The entity paused, and then, flinched in surprise at his reappearance. Shiv took full advantage of its confusion. His resurrective cocoon cracked around his body, and Shiv moved with a lightness and speed greater than anything he knew before. He blasted off the entity’s body and dismissed his temporal shell as he moved under the cover of his Creeping Void.
It was practically like he was gliding through the world. More than gliding, with every second he traveled, he moved faster, and never lost any of his previous speed. He spiked himself, and as he did, he kept building his acceleration, adding speed to speed, velocity upon velocity. Shiv's eyes widened. He spiked thrice more, and his acceleration multiplied as the inertial membrane shrouding his flesh grew more turbulent.
The entities fired their beams blindly. One clipped him, shattering his arm. But it did nothing to stop Shiv’s acceleration as he scraped himself against its body. He spiked his gravitic field rapidly, and his speed exploded to obscene levels as he just kept getting faster, without ever slowing down. The oxygen in the air exploded as he surged. Heat licked at his flesh, and to Shiv's surprise, the world slowed drastically as his reflexes grew faster as well.
The entities were still much faster than he was, but they were lost in the dark, while his acceleration continued to build ceaselessly, unrelentingly. Shiv kept spiking his gravitic field. The air cracked with his every motion. Shockwaves bled from his slightest movements. This Skill Evolution was awesome. It granted him perpetual, building velocity. It was a direct upgrade to the Momentum Core as it let him just get faster and faster. He didn’t need to absorb momentum to do this; he didn’t need to discharge. Where once he sapped from the world, now he was his own source of speed.
Shiv let out a vicious, snarling laugh as he launched himself at the adversary. He formed two more laceration spells, and he shot between a group of three entities. He fired his spells at them. All three fell apart, rendered into pieces, dissolving into tarnished grains of gold with a shared scream. Thereafter, it was like they never existed at all.
A beam cleaved toward Shiv from a kilometer above. It was a beam he wouldn’t have been able to dodge thirty seconds ago. But with his Inertial Overdrive and another spike from his gravitic field, the beam became something he could perceive and react to.
Shiv pointed his gravitic field at a downward angle and pulled. The color of the beam mauled his sanity, but missed his body. Shiv laughed. Then another entity slammed into him. His right ribs shattered. But Shiv still didn’t stop accelerating. He snarled as his skin tore. He left a bloody smear along the entity as it tried to react—but then he shot past it, and it lost track of him. Shiv groaned, chuckled, and then cried out as he found himself heading straight for the ground.
He smashed head-first into the already devastated bedrock of Gate Theborn. His nose broke. A bruise covered half his face. But even so, he kept drilling down at a constant speed. Stone gave way to obsidian. He blew through that too. And he kept going deeper into the earth. Nothing could stop his Inertial Overdrive.
Shiv felt like a god.
But then the first hints of discomfort graced Shiv's body. A grinding sensation lashed at his skin. The field of turbulent kinetic that shrouded his body, that coated him, and thundered around him, began to grow unbearably hot. He tried to slow down by spiking his gravitic field the opposite direction, but then cried out as he realized his perpetually accumulating speed far exceeded his strength. His bones fractured. His skin tore. His muscles snapped free from his skeleton.
And strangely, the force he applied to himself just made him faster.
Inertial Overdrive wasn't something that could easily be diverted. Shiv gritted his teeth and began pulling at an angle to alter his path, rather than pulling back in the other direction. This was far more extreme than even his Momentum Core. Momentum Core started dying down at some point. This was a problem with having extreme, perpetually increasing momentum. Turning was hell, and with every second he spent empowering Inertial Overdrive, the strain on his body built.
A searing heat seeped deeper and deeper into his meat. A building weight pried more of his bones apart.
Shiv blasted a full kilometer underground in the span of seconds. His insides were starting to burn as well. His brain was starting to cook inside his skull. It was all getting to be too much. Shiv clenched his teeth and froze time. His temporal shell had been entirely restored during his flight, and he used Chronomancy to help him adjust his trajectory.
To his astonishment, he was practically moving hundreds of meters every passing second. Nothing compared to how fast he was in halted time, but before, he could barely manage a few dozen meters with each spike of his gravitic field. He tried twisting his path some more, but as he spiked his gravitic field again, part of his skull caved under the immense force building around him. The inertial sheath was thundering against his body now. All the momentum he built up was burning him, crushing him, torturing him.
Shiv learned then why it was called Inertial Overdrive.
Because there was a limit to what all bodies could endure.
He felt his organs ignite from the inside out. His marrow combusted, the water within him began to evaporate. Shiv groaned as he tried to stop moving altogether instead of spiking his gravitic field another way. He couldn’t. Then, he tried pushing the inertial sheath that had been crushing him with all the pulsing kinetic energy it had built up around his body. To his surprise, he managed to do something with that. He managed to pop the sheath.
Shiv came to a violent and sudden halt. But all the force he carried with him had to go somewhere. An incomparably violent explosion of all the momentum he had been accumulating exploded out from him. It exploded so hard that half a dozen kilometers of obsidian, stone, and more simply ceased to be. Another enormous crater was added to Gate Theborn’s lowest reaches.
Shiv gagged and coughed. Blood spilled out from his eyes, his nose, his ears, and his mouth. His body was broken, and he was on the verge of passing out. He triggered the Song of the Vigilant and immediately cast a Woundeater on himself, consuming his injuries. But that didn't replace the amount of water he lost from the intense heat earlier, and so Shiv staggered to his feet, dehydrated, dazed, and… excited.
Inertial Overdrive 104 > 105