(III) Prevail

90 (III) Prevail

"Holy shit," the Deathless wheezed. The space above him was still pitch black; his Creeping Void hadn't even begun to fade. How many seconds had passed while he was in Inertial Overdrive? Shiv didn't know exactly, but every bit of acceleration built, his reflexes surged as well. He got fast. Fast enough that he could escape from the entities. Fast enough that his speed became too much for his Physicality and Toughness once again. There was a wonderful pleasure in using his skill. Just as there was a brutal cost if he overindulged.

It was like suffering a perpetual, constantly growing Momentum Core discharge. Even his Adamantium Adaption could barely endure this. Frankly, Adamantium Adaption was the only reason he was still alive. There was a price to pay for certain Skill Tiers outpacing the others. But wounds were just for Shiv. The entity had no Magical Resistance, and he killed three on the way down. He could still sense the others, feel their Chronomancy, hear the destructive blasts they left in their wake as they surged through the gate. The Creeping Void he left above was beginning to break, but he would replace it soon.

And more importantly, he wanted to discover something else.

Shiv thought,

He spiked upward into the air, and his inertial sheath thundered around him, keeping the force circulating. Then, Shiv spiked a dozen more times as his speed built and never died. He dove back into his darkness just as all the entities began turning up, preparing to head toward the surface gateway. That was a mistake.

Blackness trailed out from his body as he spiked his gravitic field another ten times. He was far beyond the sound barrier now. Every movement he made sent tides of flame crashing across the world. His skin caught fire and began to burn, his muscles tore, and his bones cracked. Shiv fed it all to his Woundeater, and he kept to the speed. There were four hundred meters between him and the nearest entity. It was still barely faster than him. It stopped being fast at all when he froze time. He launched his first spell into the entity, and it combusted, burst, bled, and died and as it howled out in abject suffering.

Far above, other versions of the Recollector shifted. They froze as Shiv dismissed his temporal shell and accelerated even harder. He destroyed his own body to maintain the insane speeds he was currently moving. For once, he was actually on par with the Recollectors when it came to speed.

"Come the fuck on," Shiv roared. He spiked himself again, he bit back a growl of anger alongside the pain, he fed that anger to his Inertial Overdrive and went even faster. His skin flayed off, his muscles tore free from his bones, his bones were ground down by friction itself, by the inertia building up inside of him. He was faster than the enemies now. But he wouldn't be able to endure this for long.

Song of the Vigilant was still active. He triggered his Icon of the Paindrinker just to make his anger worse, and it worked; agony and focus co-mingled. The Blessings from two gods clashed, and somewhere, somehow, Shiv felt the Composer and the Challenger notice each other. She flinched. He grinned.

Then the vision was gone. With pain and agony came anguish and rage-rage Shiv poured into his Chronomancy. Time froze dead, his armor flared with radiance, like a golden carapace come alight in the grip of the deepest abyss.

Five entities came toward him from three kilometers away. Five sang a distorted song that seared at his consciousness. Five unleashed thousands of beams, colors from a far dimension.

They were all too slow.

Shiv spiked his field again. His body was nearly torn in half. He wailed in mind-rending agony and fed that injury into a Woundeater. He cast a spell on the first entity he encountered. It split in half, combusted, tore apart, and was flayed in his stead. Once more, his flesh started breaking, and there were still four more in the distance. He spiked his field again, and immediately his spine folded backward. His ligaments practically unlatched themselves from his body, but he managed to cast a spell—managed to feed his wyrm. He snapped back into shape—barely in time to avoid a series of beams. He slipped between two entities, moving so fast they couldn’t keep up with him. He cast his spell out at the second enemy, and it tore in half before dissolving into motes of time.

Shiv tried spiking again, but an instinctive warning from his gut told him to stop—told him that if he did this, he would die immediately. Shiv did, but the overdrive was still getting to him. His bones were breaking with each passing second, his skin was tearing, his blood was igniting, his organs were bursting. He had boundless ammunition for his Woundeaters. That wasn't the problem. The problem was he was still too fast, constantly accelerating, never losing any speed. He shot past the remaining three entities.

Shiv looked back and felt his temporal anchors. He didn't need to turn or stop to unleash all his built-up momentum. He just needed to go back in time. And so he reverted three seconds, three seconds out of… Shiv paused. He counted fifteen echoes. Fifteen temporal anchors he could jump to.

His anger multiplied his magic by a colossal amount.

He laughed.

He jolted back in time. As soon as he arrived, he let out a cry of pain as his back snapped, his face tore off his skull, and his lungs collapsed. His speed was reduced as well. As with everything related to Chronomancy, it referenced his personal history. A few seconds ago in his time, he was on the verge of death while at a slower speed. Shiv fed another Woundeater as he traveled forward, adjusting movement vectors with a few tugs from his field. He cast out the wyrm; it sailed through the air, and he somehow he outpaced it. He shaped a laceration and cleaved a second entity in half with a mana-infused punch before the first one even died.

As Shiv got close to the final entity, it cried out.

And that was all it got as Shiv cast a final wyrm into it. It burst apart just as the first faint spider web of a crack spread across his temporal shell.

But there were no more entities around him. No more nearby, at least. He looked up, tried to track them, and his breath caught. The rest were surging toward the survivors, toward Adam and Uva. He had over ten kilometers of distance to travel, and he was pointed the wrong way. So he simply jumped back in time and aimed himself right. He pointed his gravitic field in the air and thrust out with it thrice more. His speed grew obscene again. His skin unlatched from his body like a parachute. The Paindrinker made what was already an agonizing experience a new kind of torture.

Unfortunately, Shiv was already half soul-burned from less than a day ago. "Six out of ten," Shiv snarled to himself. Time counted down. His flesh cracked and broke. As he went past ten seconds, half of it peeled away like a shattering egg. Within the shell, Shiv's brutalized, mangled form unveiled itself. Two wyrms were already circulating around both his arms.

He was on fire. It was getting hard to see since his eyes were melting out of his sockets. It was getting hard to hear because his eardrums were in the active process of bursting again. It was getting hard to breathe because his lungs were also incinerated on the inside. Frankly, it was getting hard to stay alive since his bones were being compressed down to a single point at his core. The kinetic energy was pressing down on him tighter and tighter.

He hated his own weakness. He imagined blacking out, imagined the entity reaching the people, killing all of them, killing Adam and Uva. He remembered her screams, how her arms were torn away. He remembered how Adam's head twisted in the wrong direction. He remembered Valor. Valor, Valor wasn't... He didn't know if Valor was even still alive. He didn't know if Can Hu was alive. Shiv screamed with anguish—screamed with anguish as another portion of his mind clicked back in place.

He put all his rage into Adamantine Adaption.

Immediately, his body hardened like never before. His adaption accelerated as well. All of a sudden, instead of combusting, his skin just crackled as he passed another Woundeater through himself. Third-degree burns vanished, and what replaced them barely reached the category of second. His bones fractured, but that was all they did. He screamed, and his rageful voice echoed through time.

The entities traveling in mass toward the surfacer district froze. Massive eyes snapped in his direction, but only in his general direction because they still couldn't see, because they were still so enshrouded in darkness. But they heard him. They felt him. They felt the Inertial Overdrive building in the distance.

He cast out two Woundeaters at the first entity he saw, and then it blinked out of place and was replaced by another one. Shiv gritted his teeth. “Motherfucker!”

He found the original, and it from him. The damned coward used one of its past selves to die in its stead. The other entity burst apart in the original’s place like a wet burlap sack. Black blood and strange, ropey organs filled the space before Shiv. He shot through it, moving so fast he lit the entity's remains on fire before it could fully fade back into the time stream.

The others tried responding to him. They were slow, too slow. Spells flew out from Shiv. They came asunder, their bodies mutilated in the same way he was. They screamed, and their voices echoed some of his pain, but they howled truer, they howled deeper. And for once, he felt a shudder come from all the entities. It was a shudder he hadn't felt in a while. His Dread Aura jumped ten levels, and he felt someone’s gaze fall on him.

Dread Aura 76 > 86

The Challenger is cheering.

The Dreamtaker smiles upon you.

The Stranger has noticed your existence.

The Eldest has awakened to regard you.

"That's right!" Shiv roared. "You couldn't break me, but now I'm gonna break you! Come back here, you tainted piece of shit! Stand and motherfucking deliver!"