(I) Hunt

-Draft Excerpt of, Written by Shiv (Notifications included) 97 (I)

Hunt

There were thirty-six of the vampires at the start of the second. When that second ended, most of them simply disintegrated before a sudden blast of flame or were reduced to sprays of crimson. A few Low Masters proved stronger. Stronger in the sense that their torsos remained intact. Said torsos were also launched across the horizon with the detonation of Shiv's inertial sheath.

In his hands were four lineage cores—hearts claimed from the strongest vampires. The blood and mana within the cores pulsed out and connected them to the weaker vampires in the group. That’s how Shiv remembered how the vampires were a multi-level marketing scam, with the elders getting more powerful somehow as they created more spawn or something. When he killed the weaker vampires, there wasn’t that much effort to the strong ones they were connected to, but when he slew a supposed elder, the weaker vampires’ cores magically, even while his temporal shell was active and time was halted.

Time resumed. And Shiv’s disappointment followed. He expected at least one of the vampires to be a High Master, but between Inertial Overdrive and his Chronomancy, he inflicted a bit too much damage. After spiking his gravitic field twenty times in a row, even the toughest vampire started coming apart as Shiv drew closer.

Shiv thought. Another crater lined the outside of the Abyssal Gateway, and what few bits of vegetation remained were burning as well.

He chucked the lineage cores into his cloak and sighed. “Thanks for the speed-bump, System. Now. Give me a moment so I can find some food for the gate first. I’ll fight whatever horrible bullshit you throw my way with a smile on my face if you’ll just give me a few godsdamned minutes.”

The System mocked him in response. A flash of Biomancy mana pulsed in the corner of Shiv’s vision. A vampire emerged from a cloud of dust. Then a flood of other spells came from even deeper in the woods.

The spell curved through the air, a thing of festering flesh and howling pestilence. Shiv froze time again. His temporal armor was cracked, but he still had approximately two seconds. Two seconds was a lot of time with Inertial Overdrive. He spiked his field thirty concurrent times—felt his bones fracture and his skin tear. Then, as Shiv blasted right beside the vampire, he watched as the bloodsucker’s skin flayed—and he saw more hidden scouts ignite deeper in the woods from the air friction. He popped his sheath just as his temporal shell shattered.

Three kilometers of space around him dissolved as a sphere of destruction spread out from him, incinerating a good chunk of the forest immediately outside the gateway’s premises.

Chunks of burning vampire rained down from the sky, and Shiv waited. He glared at his surroundings and pulsed his Dread Aura. Nothing. He focused his paltry Awareness, but that wasn’t that helpful, either. He kept his Creeping Void held back for a while longer as he baited out more attacks, but when none came, Shiv scoffed and let the blackness flow.

Rose began shaking. Slowly, a screen formed before him, and she whispered a series of words behind his ears.

Outside Context Problem: A monster. A Necrotech monster! That’s what killed the horde! That’s what butchered the force meant to take Gate Theborn. A monster sent by the Necrotechs to claim the gate first.

Yelette fled through the woods. Her flesh was seared. Her eardrums were burst. She was healing and weeping and fleeing at the same time. It took her some time to manage the teleportation spell while maintaining Stealth, but she did. The Elders needed to know… They needed to know this gate was lost to them.

It was a Necrotech Gate now.

Shiv considered the vision for a moment and let out an amused chuckle. “Well. This should make things confusing for the First Blood. Might make them think twice about coming here again.”

He channeled a Biomancy spell and repaired the damage he'd inflicted on his bone armor through his inertial detonations. The System was probably going to send another problem for him soon, and maybe the next time it would be something horrific or nightmarish, something he couldn't handle so easily.

He shot high into the air, and as he did, he momentarily paused to look at the old ruins just a few kilometers away from the gateway. He remembered stepping through it the first time he rushed up to Gate Theborn weeks ago with 811. Shiv felt a strange kinship to ruins. It was a place of history, but also a place of mystery. When he had a moment, he would go take a look there.

For now, though, he shot off across the land, blasting over the ravine he once fell from while dragging along the mind-broken Jealousy and the slaves inside. Now, he kept himself at a respectable speed and maintained his Creeping Void. His Master-Tier Stealth Skill was paradoxically very noticeable overall, but it made pinpointing his exact position very hard. Just the way Shiv liked it.

He kept to a quick but controllable pace. Shiv discovered Inertial Overdrive still built up over time. Much slower than how fast it would when he spiked his gravitic field, but the pressure and speed still climbed at a terrifying rate. To maintain a controllable, non-destructive speed, he ended up popping his sheath every few seconds or so.

Across the Umbral Wilderness, loud booms declared Shiv’s path. Eventually, he decided against using his Inertial Overdrive altogether. He wasn’t traveling in a hurry, after all. And the noise he was making was probably alerting enemies to his presence from kilometers away.

Shiv mused.

Past the slaughter and destruction near the Abyssal Gateway, the bioluminescent beauty of the Umbral Wilderness revealed itself, and Shiv let out a briefly comforted sigh. It was a reminder that not all the world was consumed by this madness. There were still some places of calm and beauty left. He didn't think he could ever regard the Umbral Wilderness as such a place. But after his experiences within Gate Theborn, he would take being killed by a group of feral weavers over and over again compared to the torture he suffered facing the Recollector.

From on high, he scoured the land while blanketing entire sections of the wilderness with his Creeping Void. The darkness concealed his exact position and proved to be a layer of confusion against anyone who tried to ambush him. With how the System was acting, Shiv didn’t want to take any chances.

While he flew from above, he focused on his senses and mana fields. He knew in the river below there would likely be some of those strange shrimp, and he knew also that there were rabbit-like entities elsewhere in the wilderness.

Shiv thought. And he began to strain his awareness as well, trying to pick out key details on land, listening carefully, as he tried to gather more information. But the quieter sounds were drowned by the air rushing past him, and the rest of the noise seemed to blend together and not offer him much of anything useful.

There were noises coming everywhere, but for a long while he'd disregarded it as white noise, ambience he could ignore.

After a bit of searching, he found dense patches of sprawling blue colors and shot straight down. To his delight, he was looking at a massive cluster of mendules. He swept across the ground and started gathering them en masse with a massive smile perked on his face. As he harvested his favorite abyssal mushrooms, Shiv hummed as he collected a few other varieties of micro-fungi as well. Those were hard-capped and light green, and Shiv’s Biomancy felt a few odd growths inside them.

And thus began a period of peaceful foraging. He spent far too much time fighting these days. Far too much. Being consumed by bloodshed without time to decompress and cook couldn't be healthy.

Shiv wanted to be a Pathbearer more than anything. He wanted a life of adventure, of freedom. A life that was his own. But not all of that life needed to be apocalyptic violence. And it wouldn't be if he had any say in it. He would have been more than happy being a chef, he realized. The battle-lust that took him was sometimes a thrill like no other, but cooking left him feeling and . It was the part of him that stood beyond the casual brutality of the world. Creating rather than breaking.

And there, as he hovered over a vast field of mendules, Shiv felt an overwhelming sense of peace pulse from his very core. He thought back to when he faced the Recollector. Merely a few hours ago he was being twisted, broken, torn apart again and again, tortured for what felt like an eternity at the time. A few hours ago, he struggled and fought and died over and over again.

So much death had choked Gate Theborn. Too much. Shiv thought about how he'd interacted with the people afterwards and frowned slightly. With a few hours distance from his deeds and his blood now calm, some of what he did seemed a bit too vicious. He didn’t mind killing. It didn’t bother him at all, as long as he thought they really deserved it . He liked facing and breaking powerful enemies, but he was still slightly unnerved by how many people he had slaughtered over the past few days alone, and how normal it all felt to him. Like he had just taken a brisk jog.

Shiv thought. He considered how terrified the mercenaries were—how disconnected he felt from their needs and the needs of the other survivors.

An impossible fight was thrust upon him, and somehow he and the others came out alive. They were rewarded for their struggle with power and advancements, but with that reward came a certain fate. A fate that locked them into more conflict.

Even now Shiv could feel the System's oppressive desires swell around him. It was pulling him from place to place, pulling things towards him, attempting to inspire new struggles. And he knew Valor’s words were right. Most people would have broken under the strain, the trauma, the suffering. By this point, Shiv barely cared how badly the Recollector tortured him. Thinking back just pissed him off, and getting mad made him more powerful in combat.

And that made Shiv think of some of his skills as well. Several of his strongest skills were commonly found in dragons and other colossal monsters. His Chronomancy was a dragon’s Master-Tier Chronomancy Evolution. His Adamantine Adaption too. Comparing his skills with other individual Pathbearers, his skills were more brutal and destructive by far. And he was inclined toward instinct and violence—was impossibly resistant.

Shiv considered Adam. Adam was . Shiv could feel how badly broken the Young Lord’s courage was when facing the Recollector. Death shook Adam—left him traumatized. Even now, Adam’s mind was in turmoil—and Shiv didn’t know what that was like at all. It was like trauma and misery glided over him. It was oil to his water—it touched but didn’t linger. He was pent-up. Frustrated. He wanted to cook. But he could fight. He could do this . But Adam couldn’t. Uva could modify her own mind, but even she had her limits.

Meanwhile, all it took for Shiv to enter a state of relative bliss were a few blue mendules in his hands and a moment of peace. Slowly, he was beginning to understand why the way he acted bothered people.

Shockingly, no response came. A breeze rustled his hair. Shiv glared out at his surroundings. At the shadowy mountains in the distance, at massive mushrooms swaying in the wind, at the forests nearby, the trees filled with strange serpent-ape things that shrieked fearfully at his Creeping Void.

He let out a sigh, and let it go.

As he finished with his mushroom gathering, he followed a nearby river and picked some of the weird shrimp creatures out from its bottom as well. With the crustaceans, he also discovered a strange patch of thick, glistening weeds. He wanted to see how that tasted later. Perhaps he would have a bite first himself to make sure it wasn't threatening to anyone else along with a few of the mushrooms.

Awareness 11 > 12