(I) Regroup

-Essential Reading at Phoenix Academy of the Yellowstone Republic

51 (I)

Regroup

Psychomancy > 11

Parry > 48

Gravitic Wrestler > 108

Momentum Core > 78

He awoke again with a sudden shout. His mind still felt raw, but he could remember. Remember… fighting the …

He looked behind himself, and he remembered a few fragments more.

He remembered how he was drifting through that mind-broken haze. He remembered how badly the monster wounded him. He remembered… He frowned as he promptly lost track of his own thoughts. What was his name? It was… Wait, he was pretending to be someone, right? Was he pretending to be… Shiv? Was he actually someone else?

Name: Tanner “Shiv” Lowe

Age: 18

Race: Human

Path:

Deathless

Okay. So. He was probably Shiv. It looked more like a nickname instead of his actual name, but looking at his actual name made him reactively. So. Shiv it was. He could kind of remember his Path and stuff like that, but it was hard to recall… So many things were hard to recall for him.

Then, as he looked forward, he saw all the people still staring at him.

Most of them were seated. They’d helped each other as best they could. The injured lay on their sides or gathered in a pile, given what comfort they had. The others looked haggard and miserable, but they were trying. Everyone was also sweating from the unceasing heat and partially soaked in a pool of blood. Shiv could feel the pool because of his Biomancy. He blinked. He didn’t know why he could remember that. Right now, his Biomancy was really painful to use, though. Its field still felt pretty ruptured.

At the head of the survivors was a girl. She was dressed in rags and wore these thick, ruined boots. Boots that were filled with blood. She was still staring at Shiv—staring at him and his previous body beside him. Shiv noticed his corpse as well, still clad in the exoskeleton. With a grunt, he pushed himself off the Greater Demon and—

Shiv froze. He turned around to see the Jealousy. The monster he came to kill. It was… It looked fine. But it wasn’t moving. He knew it was dead. He remembered…. That they were battling each other within the mindscape of one of the slaves. He bound his thoughts to it. He learned how to do that from someone he cared for—someone he had been intimate with. Her name was lost to him, drifting among the debris of his mind, but he could remember her pale skin, her subtle smile, the scars on her lip, her eyes of deepest blue, and her hair. She cut her hair shorter because of something. They survived something together. Something intense. Whatever he learned to do with her, he did it to the Greater Demon. And that broke the Jealousy somehow. He felt it break. He felt it come apart before he did. It couldn't handle the pain.

For a few moments, he just stared at the unmoving titan, dead of mind but still whole of body.

Shiv was pretty annoyed about that. He thought about cancer for some reason. Why could it heal like that when people just got cancer and died?

“This is… bullshit,” Shiv muttered, unable to shake the feeling of annoyance. And intense triumph. Then he looked at the slave girl. “Did I… do that?”

She blinked in surprise, not expecting him to ask her anything. “I… uh, yeah! You did. You… you killed it. I don’t know how, but… I think it’s dead.”

Shiv looked back at the Jealousy and nodded. He clenched his fists.

“How long was I out?” Shiv asked. He was still reeling from the fight, parts of his memories were pockets—were emptiness. He didn’t know if this damage was going to be lasting, but at least he could remember his own name now and sort of recall who he was. The broader parts of his own history and why he was here was still missing, though.

“Hours,” the girl whispered. She looked shocked, even scared of him. He could feel fear with his Dread Aura skill, and he realized everyone in the room was beyond terrified of him. That filled Shiv with a particularly bitter feeling. His mind might be partially shattered, but many of the people around him were just drifting dead in pools of blood.

“How many of you died?” he asked. “Did… I remember trying to keep the monster away from you. I think.” Shiv clenched his jaw as he looked at the half-submerged face of a pretty young-looking . “I didn’t want so many of you to die.”

The girl swallowed and nodded quickly. “Okay. So, you—you won’t hurt us, right?”

Shiv looked at the survivors, took in their wounds, and let out a breath. “No. Actually. I think… I think I can help you.” There were still a few hundred slaves. Maybe four hundred? He might be able to heal them if he tried. Shiv triggered his Biomancy—and let out a howl as agony coursed through his being and caused him to fall over once again. He barely stopped himself from blacking out again.

His sudden shout of pain made the slaves flinch. The girl fell backward into the pool of blood, backing away from Shiv on her rear and palms. When he remained in his doubled-over state, she slowly stood back up and regarded him with a look of caution. “Are you alright?”

With a grunt of effort, Shiv pushed himself to his feet and shook his head, causing droplets of blood to fly everywhere. “I think… I think I hurt something deep inside of me,” Shiv choked out. It wasn’t just his mind. It was his soul as well. Trying to use magic right now felt like thrusting a burning rod into an open wound. That was the closest comparison he could think of. He needed more time to recover, but that also meant he wasn’t going to be healing the surviving slaves anytime soon.

“Okay,” Shiv said, taking in a shaky breath. “I can’t use my magic on you. So. I think… I think…” He frowned. He was thinking about food. Making food. In fact, he really wanted to make food right now. If he didn’t, he would feel all kinds of pent-up. This knowledge came to him through raw intuition. “How many of you are hungry?”

The slaves just stared at him. Some of their faces were tear-streaked, some were wounded, most were haggard, and all were scared.

“Hungry?” the girl asked, incredulous.

“Yeah. I don’t feel hungry, but I need to cook something… something to make me feel better.” He turned to regard the Greater Demon he had killed. “Yeah, this thing. Maybe we can try eating this thing. It’s got a lot of meat, right?” The girl gawked at him and didn’t say anything. Several other slaves mirrored her reaction. “I think I might be able to prepare this. I just need to follow my gut.”

As Shiv strode over to one of the Jealousy’s unmoving tentacles, he noticed just how many people had been crushed under it. The monster had eight limbs, and all of them were splayed wide across the room in death. The entire chamber was not much wider than the creature’s armspan, so the fact that a few hundred slaves were still alive surprised Shiv. This could have been a lot worse.

His instincts told him to use his Biomancy to pull the Greater Demon apart. That wasn’t an option for Shiv right now, so he went for his second favorite option: brute force. He clenched his fists, his muscles surging with power. The power to shatter mountains, the power to wrestle tsunamis and defy storms. A hyper-reactive gravity field was woven into Shiv’s very body, and he felt like he could direct his full strength against anything he could touch. Not only that, though, he now had an intuitive understanding of how to use his gravitic field to bend, to break, to throw, to choke.

“Gravitic Wrestler,” Shiv muttered, looking through his personal status. “Huh. That sounds pretty powerful. I think… I think I remember slamming this monster against…” His voice trailed off as he looked up at the walls. Most of this place’s interior was deformed, dented outward as if it had sustained multiple immense impacts. Blood was smeared all over the walls. Ten broken nubs jutted out high above, composed of broken focus crystals. “Holy shit. I was strong enough to do that?”

A flash of a memory washed over him. The memory of him slamming the Jealousy against the walls over and over again. He let out a disbelieving laugh as he imagined himself fighting the creature. He was barely a speck next to it. This was like an insect out-wrestling a full-grown person. More memories came to him. Memories of dying over and over. That made him stronger somehow. Was he invincible too? Maybe immortal? Shiv couldn’t recall. Whatever the case, his mind was definitely very vulnerable.

“Alright, you big, dead bastard,” Shiv murmured as he regarded the Jealousy. Its colossal eye was blank and unmoving, but he still felt uneasy, expecting it to rise and attack him at any moment. When it didn’t, Shiv rolled his shoulder and stared at one of its limbs. It was densely armored, ridged by a thick, rough carapace. Shiv looked at his own fist and realized there was a slightly metallic sheen to his skin. “Let’s see if I’m actually as strong and tough as I vaguely remember being.”

He focused his field around his elbow and drove it against the monster’s carapace. His first blow was already colossal. The shell fractured. A shockwave crashed against him—but Shiv found himself able to push back against the force without issue, shrugging it aside as if he were dealing with a breeze. He hit the limb several times more before the outer shell cracked completely, exposing the flesh hidden inside. “Alright,” Shiv said, licking his lips. “Just let me rip a good chunk off for everyone.”

He reached in with his hands, wondering how he was supposed to rip a good chunk of meat out with his tiny fingers, when he suddenly realized his earlier instincts were right. Everything he touched, he could twist or manipulate with his gravitic field. He closed his fists then and pulled as he was stripping the meat off a drumstick. His field pinched around the edge of the Greater Demon’s limb and let him rip a massive boulder of flesh free after some tugging.

The whole process still took a bit of effort, even without the Greater Demon struggling against him. Another memory came back to him. A memory of him breaking the neck of a large and vicious rat. Shiv paused. If he was strong enough to wrestle with a literal mountain, why was he struggling against something like a rat before? How old was he? The status said eighteen. That didn’t seem normal.

Shiv thought, half-jokingly. With his mind the way it was, it very well might be true.

He turned to the slaves, holding a mass of flesh well over ten times his size with one arm. They stared at him, slack-jawed and stunned. Shiv frowned at them, frowned at the blood on the ground, and then considered the pieces of broken carapace that were now scattered about. “Give me a moment. Let’s see what I can do with this.”

About five minutes later, everyone had gotten onto higher ground and was sitting on one of the Jealousy’s limbs to avoid the searing stones and pools of blood. Shiv walked along the length of the Jealousy’s limbs as he handed the survivors makeshift carapace bowls and bone daggers he found inside his cloak. “There aren’t that many bowls, so you might have to share,” Shiv said as he handed his last dagger to the girl. She took the dagger and yelped as it almost dragged her to the ground. She could barely bear its weight even with both hands. Near the Jealousy’s main body, Shiv had a massive makeshift cauldron going as well. The cauldron itself was also made from carapace, and he filled it with water after looking through his skills again and realizing he had a Hydromancy Skill. It wasn’t very strong, but after some effort, he managed a steady stream that he first used to cleanse the slaves and himself of blood before turning it on the cauldron. After that, he used his Pyromancy to heat the water to a fast boil before he started peeling the massive chunk of meat he took from the Jealousy earlier into slices.

The flesh was almost the color of night, but spots of redness and bits of rough texture gave the meat some added character. Shiv used his Gravitic Wrestler Skill to rip neat and large strips out of the meat before mincing it down to small, perfect squares. The moment he started preparing food, everything became to him. Every action he did was . No mistakes, all focus; utterly unstoppable.

The meat came aglow with an ethereal light, but Shiv didn’t even question it that much. He just let instinct take hold and worked accordingly. He first cleaned the meat thoroughly—picked out bits of tendon, secured and layered it with a well-distributed sheen of fat. Then, he started cooking the slices in boiling water, casting small spells of water and fire as he judged the state of the meat without fail. Soon, he was handing strips of flesh to the slaves who had bowls.

They looked at him and his food with wide eyes and reluctant expressions. Fear still gripped them, so Shiv decided to do a demonstration by eating a bit of the meal himself first. “Don’t worry, it’s probably safe. I’m pretty sure it’s safe.” He paused and frowned. “You’re allowed to not eat it if I die, how’s that?”

Several of the slaves looked at each other.

“Am I having another stroke?” a hoarse voice asked.

Shiv ignored them as he bit into the flesh. He expected something hard, tasteless, and mostly serviceable. What he got was a very subtle, salty-bitter flavor thanks to what he did with the Greater Demon’s fat and how long he let the meat simmer each time. The texture wasn’t too bad either. Not easy to bite through, but quite chewy and softened enough for even the teeth of a Pathless.

And the longer Shiv chewed, the more he liked it. The taste lingered on his tongue, and the meat was the most filling thing he remembered ever eating. “Maybe… maybe I’m a chef?” Shiv theorized as he kept chewing. It certainly fit with the name of his skill. “Maybe… maybe I save people from giant monsters and then cook them. Like some kind of… monster cooker?” As he was considering this, something in his mind, and Shiv gasped as something clicked back in place.

Perfected Boiled Jealousy Meat has granted you temporary Cognitive Regeneration.

The Challenger is roaring with laughter.