(II) Reinforce

93 (II) Reinforce

The teleportation anchor split in half. Shiv threw away the topmost section, chucking it far without even a second thought. He let out a tense breath as he looked inside, preparing himself for the worst, but then he saw an opening. An opening that he remembered seeing several times over the course of the past few days. It looked like a portal within the teleportation anchor had been opened. Then he realized it wasn't a portal. It was a smaller dimension, a… Category 1 dimension. , Shiv remembered. Can Hu got a Master-Tier item from the Dragon-Knight Quest as well. The .

A frame of metal became the archway holding a new portal, and it sat at the center of the crumpled teleportation anchor, surrounded by a cube of dense alloy to stop it from being crushed. Through the portal, Shiv saw two gleaming green eyes stare back at him. A smile curved on his face immediately.

"Can Hu!" Shiv cried, his heart accelerating, joy catching fire in his veins..

"Pathbearer Shiv," Can Hu replied, and he could hear relief and satisfaction in Can Hu's echoing tones as well.

Uva untangled herself from him, but left more than a few strands inside his mind as she continued mending him. Adam slipped past Shiv and squeezed into the mangled remains of the teleportation anchor. He sprinted into the small dimension of growing alloy, and his sun shone bright. The azure dawn splashed over Can Hu and over the scattered and still broken form of Valor.

Shiv's initial joy evaporated. Valor was still broken, unmoving. A hardened dread cemented inside Shiv. He couldn't imagine a world where Valor could die, yet the possibility gnawed at him. But even so, while Can Hu was standing, supported by a column of stone and several pieces of metal that held his body as if an armor stand, Valor lay unmoving on the ground, lifeless, soulless even.

Shiv snarled internally.

Uva’s connection comforted him, but it made no difference. If Valor died, if any of them had died during this battle, what the hells would he do? For the first time, Shiv felt himself deflated. His mood swung drastically, and a sudden onrush of crushing despair nearly flooded his mind, and then it broke away as his focus jumped.

"Sorry," Uva said. "It's just, the damage is…"

Shiv thought.

"Screaming incoherently, like a borderline vegetable, lost to a berserk rage," Uva surmised accurately with a slight hint of deadpan humor.

Shiv nodded. "Yeah, probably that." And then another memory returned to him unbidden. He remembered charging the entity, screaming how he was the chef and it was the food. Shiv cringed. Uva let out a slight huff of laughter, but it was diminished as Adam knelt down and checked on Valor.

"Pathbearer Adam," Can Hu said. Its voice echoed in imitation of an exhalation. "What is that?" Can Hu directed a small pebble towards Adam's azure sun. "I feel…" Can Hu moved. Its damaged body shifted, even with Shiv's cracked armor weighing on it. It let out a slow groan of pain, but it moved of its own accord.

Shiv's eyes widened, and Uva's mind went still.

"I am…” Can Hu gasped. “My skills, they are still broken, but my existing skills, the ones that are whole, their levels are climbing. They are…"

"Yeah," Shiv breathed. "Adam here had a run-in with the Stranger, and now…" His mind trailed off. He forgot what he was talking about. "I'll let you tell him later," Shiv said, suddenly feeling extremely mentally exhausted.

Then Adam's light faded from Shiv's body, faded from everyone but Valor. Shiv groaned as he clutched at his chest. The bleeding intensified immediately. The pain lining the left hemisphere of his entire person flared to a roaring height once more.

Uva groaned. The sheer damage sustained by her mind leaked over into Shiv's, and his thoughts began to skip rapidly as well. He only remembered the following moments in fractured instances, but he saw Adam channeling a spray of azure sunlight over the downed Legendary Pathbearer. For a few seconds, Valor was drowned in a resplendent blue glow. Shiv held his breath, and then he let it out multiple times because he kept forgetting where he was and who he was. It didn't help that the psionic backlash inflicted a cascade and caused Uva to forget herself as well. She was constantly blinking. He rapidly veered towards berserk, and then she had to undo his anger before something happened.

But finally, Adam sagged forward, and Shiv shot into the minor dimension. He caught the Young Lord before he could fall, and Adam muttered a grateful "thanks." And beneath them, a glow returned to Valor's eyes. There was a flicker, but then it faded again. Shiv felt his stomach drop once more. Then a burst of sparks ignited, and Valor started twitching into motion. The other pieces of his body, the dagger and the arms, slid into place within his reforming ghostly visage.

Then Valor shot up, manifesting his Necromancy.

A corrosive blade slashed out just as Shiv's mind lost track of where he was. Adam tackled him as his vector wings flared. He moved Shiv out of the room, both of them gliding weightlessly, reactionlessly, avoiding Valor's strike by the distance of a meter.

"Come, let me show you how a—" And then Valor stopped talking. He finally noticed who he was looking at.

Adam regarded the Legendary Pathbearer. "Valor, are you well? Are you?"

Shiv, meanwhile, staggered over to Valor, uncaring about the Necromantic blade, and tried to hug the ghost. He forgot, momentarily, that Valor was currently imprinted by a shroud of Necromancy as well.

"No!" Adam screamed. He shot forward and pinned Shiv against the wall. His acceleration rattled them both. That's how Shiv discovered that force could still be enacted on Adam. His vectors of reactionless acceleration applied mainly to his movement, and not his body specifically. How that worked was beyond Shiv's understanding. He would probably have to ask a Dynamancer. And, unfortunately, he forgot to make a note of that too, because his temporary amnesia skipped in once more.

Adam, meanwhile, walked closer to Valor, and the Legendary Pathbearer staggered back, hovering in the air though lethargically. His pieces shivered as if his spirit could barely sustain their weight. "We are alive. We have not been taken as thralls for the Outsiders," Valor noted, sounding somewhat awestruck. "I thought that would be our certain fate. I thought I would be made a personal vessel for the Stranger to use as a puppet to torment me and the rest of us for as long as it could sustain our souls."

He studied Adam, Shiv, and Uva for a moment. Then his eyes fell on Shiv. "Shiv, your clothes…"

"They got burned off," Shiv muttered. "I can't remember how." And then he remembered how. "Oh yeah, I was fighting that weird thing, and I developed a Heroic-Tier Reflexes Skill, and then I started moving really fast and the world became really hot and…" Shiv rambled on and then stopped as he forgot what he was talking about.

Adam took over talking to Valor instead. "A lot has happened. But what about you? Are you well?"

He kept his sun concentrated on the Legendary Pathbearer, and beneath Adam's azure glow, Valor let out a rasp of relief. "Slightly better now than I was. But the damage the Outsider did to my form, how could…" And then he regarded Adam's azure sun. "What is this? What have you gained?"

"The Righteous Dawn Prevails," Adam intoned. "I am a Unique Pathbearer now." He tried and failed to hide a grin.

Shiv looked at Adam. "You're a Unique Pathbearer?" He blinked. "When in the hells did that happen?"

Adam looked at Shiv and shook his head. "Shiv, you have amnesia. You'll remember in a moment."

"I will? Oh, oh, right."

"And Uva," Valor continued. Now he was regarding the Umbral Psychomancer. "Your eyes, those colors…"

"I've reached into the Outside," Uva admitted uncomfortably. "And I suppose something came of it. I, too, am a Unique Pathbearer now.”

Valor went silent for a long moment. "Is that all?"

"No," Uva admitted. "I have another skill, another one I gained while still inside the Recollector's mind."

"What Tier?" Valor asked, sounding like he didn't want to know the answer. Shiv was confused as to why. Becoming stronger was a good thing. Gaining major Skill Evolutions was awesome. So why did Valor sound terrified?

"Heroic," she admitted, and she sounded shaken as she did. "It was… I don't think it was supposed to happen. I don't think I was supposed to develop a skill."

"What? Why not?" Shiv breathed.

"Because it's not my skill," she said. "I tore it… I tore a piece away from the Recollector while I was inside it. And that piece slid into my Psychomancy and broke off. And then it resided inside of me. It changed inside of me."

"It was like this for me as well," Adam said. "Was it purified, changed by another force?"

"The Starhawk. He intervened on my behalf."

"The Starhawk," Valor said, sounding more and more lost with every passing second. He looked at Shiv, and Shiv just shrugged. Shiv shrugged doubly, as he forgot he'd just shrugged.

"Yes," Adam said. "I see. I think… I think a good portion of what happened to us just now was a scheme, a plot on the side of the System. It wanted us to take pieces from the eldritch, the Outsiders. pieces. Pieces that we couldn't possibly develop on our own. Not nearly this fast. And then pieces that would be molded to us, that would be sculpted by us by our own, by our own manner." And Adam shook his head. The stress was too much. He didn't want to deal with this right now. "I'm just glad you're all right."

"We are not all right," Valor said. "We are far from all right." The ominous tone in the Legendary Pathbearer's voice silenced everyone.

"Adam, at this pace you are all developing at… For Shiv, I could understand. His nature is aberrant," he said, sounding slightly apologetic.

Shiv just shrugged. "Yeah, but I kinda like it.”

"Because you’re a freak," Adam muttered. Shiv grinned.

"But for both of you," Valor continued, regarding Adam and Uva. "Adam, you are skilled in many regards, prodigious in some, but…" He trailed off. He regarded Uva. "And you, Sister, you are focused. You have great potential, but this… this is beyond even genius."

Uva nodded. "I would not call myself a genius either. I would say I'm more determined, perhaps analytical, but not so insightful. I've seen true insight. I've seen true genius."

"And one could build to that," Valor said in slight repudiation. "One could grow themselves, grow their own potential until they truly hit that point of mastery above mastery. But for me…" He tried to gather his words. "It took me forty years to gain a Heroic Skill. And I was considered peerless for my time." He looked at all of them. His skull shivered, the crack lining his bones still glistened, but an azure glow kept Valor infused with strength. "Shiv, have you…"

"Yeah, I got another Heroic Skill. Yeah, I got another Heroic Skill," Shiv said. He paused. "I also got," he narrowed his eyes, "two Master Skills. One for Stealth, one for Chronomancy."

"Chronomancy?" Valor said.

"Yeah, it just popped in immediately when my kukri broke while we were all pinned by the entity." Shiv glared hard at nothing in particular. "Come to think of it, I think that was the System's plan too. It gave me the skill the moment I was desperate and defenseless. I think it was planned this all along. The kukri, I was attuning to its mana, and after the entity held me in place…"

"Yes, that pushed you over the edge, especially with your death," Valor said with a hiss. Then, he paused. "I have seen those truly favored by the System. System-favored. But this is on another level. What is happening to you all is… I have never seen so much conflict and resulting growth concentrated on three people, just three, in all my years."

Adam shuddered slightly. "Valor, you're scaring me. Please stop."

"I'm scaring ?" Valor hissed. "My memories are broken. My spirit is scattered. I just came closer to death mere weeks after being freed from decades of being caged than I have in the past thousand years." Valor paused. "Perhaps that's an overstatement. But still, do you know what it's like to be shattered after having so much strength? There are so few things I can honestly say I have no idea about. And this is one of them. I have no idea why you three, you three are so… are so…" And then Valor's burning sockets centered on Shiv. And he had an epiphany. "Oh," Valor breathed. "Oh, I… I think I might have a theory. I think I…" He sagged slightly. "But first, what… what happened to this place?" He looked beyond the Garden of Bountiful Alloy to the sheer devastation that now defined Gate Theborn.

"I… Yeah, that… that might be my fault," Shiv said. "I got into a pretty nasty fight with the entity." He grinned. "I won."

"You won?" Adam said. "I killed the bloody thing."

"Yeah. After I fought it for an hour."

“I had to jump into its mind,” Uva said, narrowing her eyes at Shiv in annoyance. “I had to put you back together.”

"It spent most of that hour torturing you," Adam snapped.

"Enough," Uva replied, cutting into their conversation like a thrusting dagger. "We should leave. We should go back and find a temporary shelter. More." Uva’s mana strands speared back toward the last surviving district of Gate Theborn. "There are people who need our help. People under the rubble."

Shiv suddenly remembered. A piece of his mind slipped back in, and he hissed as a pain rushed through his consciousness.

Uva winced. "Sorry."

"It's fine," Shiv grunted. "Keep going. I can handle it. I can handle anything."

Uva stared at him and sighed. A small smile lit her face. "I know.”

"All right. Well…" And as soon as Adam started turning his sun's radiance away from Valor, the Pathbearer crashed down against the ground, lifeless once more.

Everyone stared. Adam blinked, and then he immediately poured his The Righteous Dawn Prevails back into Valor. Valor shot back up to life with a bellow.

"I think," Adam said, "I think that you might stay broken without the help of my sun."

Valor regarded Adam's The Righteous Dawn Prevails, and his body language sagged with defeat and exhaustion. "Let us be away, then, at least temporarily. There is… much for us to consider."

And from behind him, a loud, muffled moan came, and Shiv noticed a form bundled in layers of flayed skin. He recalled why the man was bundled and who the man was.

"Oh, yeah," Shiv laughed. "Hey, Uva! I got you an owl."

"I know. You truly bring me the sweetest gifts," the Umbral Psychomancer said dryly.