(II) Hunt

98 (II) Hunt

Nearby, Shiv saw windmills turning, but as their burning wheels spun, his gut clenched as he saw bodies hanging from each of the turning flaps.

"Great One," Angelo whimpered. "I… I promised they would be safe here. I invited them to live here… They were desperate. I thought I could offer them something… A life… Hope…”

"Angelo," Shiv said, planting a hand on the heartbroken vampire's shoulder to steady him. "I can’t do anything for them now, but I can still kill the bastards who did this. Unless you want to end them yourself after I'm through with them. Or torture them.”

Angelo drew in a long, shuddering breath. "I… would prefer not to. It is not my way."

"Yeah, well, that’s fine. More levels for me."

Angelo’s eyes widened as he regarded Shiv with a look of disbelief. Shiv studied the other buildings in the town. Most of them were on fire. Several had been reduced to rubble. Blood choked the streets. Blood, viscera, and abominations shaped from them. So, the vampires had to still be around. Either that, or they left some of their minions here for no reason.

Shiv squinted his eyes as he studied the disfigured monsters forged from blood, tissue, teeth, and teratoma. Screams echoed out from one of the buildings, a particularly large one that seemed to be some kind of silo. Shiv had to guess it was meant to store food. Now, well, maybe it was still meant to store food. But food the vampires revered—.

Angelo was shaking, but he was no longer in a sorrowful state. Instead, he trembled with rage. Shiv didn't look at the vampire's face. That was always a mistake. Even without him trying, Angelo's Master-Tier Charm Skill was distracting at a glance, and potentially full-on compromising if one's gaze truly lingered.

Shiv wondered if the skill could be used during combat, and he realized he might have neglected his Silver Tongue skill more than he thought.Shiv realized. It was technically Rose's, according to the Educator.

the dead Diviner whispered.

Shaking his head, Shiv focused his senses on the problems at hand.

He didn't go rushing in. Not that he didn't want to do just that. Part of his instincts were already screaming at him to charge through, to use his Inertial Overdrive and annihilate the Blood Horrors. He knew they couldn't stop him. But he also understood something about how the vampires fought. After facing them at Gate Theborn, he knew that the Blood Horrors were chaff, expendable by design. They buried enemies under their numbers. In some ways, they were practically an army of living meat shields for the vampires, ones that the true Pathbearers within the First Blood's forces could spend and wield. Blood Horrors created openings and took up the enemy's attention. All the high vampires, and to some extent, the lesser vampires, were more focused, striking at the most dangerous among the enemy Pathbearers.

Just then, he saw someone emerge from the silo. They held a small body in their grasp, and the Deathless clenched his jaw tight. His eyes bulged. Rage ignited inside him, but Shiv spent it immediately on his Awareness Skill. His vision and hearing improved.

Awareness 12 > 13

Even from this distance, he could tell that it was the corpse of a child. The small body was missing its arms and legs, and the one holding him was a tall vampire, dressed in fine robes and loudly proclaiming something to no one in particular. But then something in Shiv's instincts changed. It told him to wait. It told him that there was something there, something he wasn't seeing.

"Why won’t they stop… Why… What is the meaning of any of this!" Angelo hissed. He nearly rushed forward. His fingers turned into thin, sharp-tipped claws, but Shiv reached down. He clutched Angelo by the shoulder and held him in place.

"No. We don’t do this recklessly. There are still other people alive. We go at my command.”

Angelo wanted to protest, but he fell silent as his gaze met Shiv's ever so briefly. Where Angelo had his charm, Shiv had Dread Aura. It was an Adept-Tier Skill, but it went a long way in direct moments of persuasion.

About three seconds later, Shiv's patience was rewarded, as something emerged in the air above the town, seemingly from thin air. A ripple came first. A massive pulse of wind revealed the edges of a colossal mass of bones. Its edges were sleek and bright. It looked like the armor Shiv wore, but it was made of pure bone, ridges of scar tissue growing over it, and transparent membranes connecting the many pieces, and tentacles seeping through the cracks. As the aerial distortion faded entirely, Angelo let out a brief rasp of air, and Shiv laid eyes on a Court Leviathan for the first time in his life.

The entire thing was massive. It was, to his estimation, approximately four kilometers long, dwarfing even the Recollector. It resembled something between a whale and an insect. Legs that reminded Shiv of grasshoppers jutted out from its sides, but were curved and folded inward, hidden around jagged ribs. The head of the creature was axe-shaped, and a cluster of eyes ran down the sides. Atop its skull, there was a thin slit that gleamed brightly, and a moment thereafter, Shiv realized he was looking at a window.

Shiv blinked. He'd seen sky ships in Blackedge before, manor ships of certain Lords that sailed through the air on rare occasions. Those weren't unusual, but even the largest sky ship he'd ever seen hadn't been more than 200 meters long. He'd heard from other townspeople that they needed immense amounts of resources to power and operate, and usually it was simply more beneficial for lone Pathbearers with high teleportation or transportation skills to move things across the land. That, and mana cores were pretty rare.

This thing was not a sky ship, it was a sky beast, something that could fly of its own accord, but then could also be used as something of a troop transport for the First Blood.

Shiv saw its capabilities as Blood Horrors dropped from a ring of spooling tendons connected to the midsection of the Court Leviathan. And after a new batch of abominations was delivered, the tendons snapped free from them, like an umbilical cord detaching from a newborn. The high vampires who departed the Court Leviathan didn't need these tendons; they simply leaped and sailed through the air, levitating themselves gracefully or crashing down without suffering any damage. Shiv regarded the scene unfolding before him for a few moments longer, even as Angelo shuddered and struggled in his grasp.

"That's a pretty big beast they got there," Shiv said, staring up at it. He frowned and looked at Angelo. “All that for just you and this town?”

“No,” Angelo breathed. “It was just a thing of convenience. They were meant to serve as support. That is what I overheard.”

“Support?”

“They were preparing to take a Compact Gate nearby. But something happened, and they just… stopped… and they took the opportunity to come for me once they sensed my core… The Compact Gate Guardians didn’t come to chase them off for some reason. Their patrols were absent too, for days now.” Angelo sucked in a ragged breath. “Their protection was promised by a contract I signed when buying this land from them! But they didn't come…”

Shiv clenched his teeth hard and struggled not to growl. And there it was again: the ripples of his actions. He'd tried to do good, but consequences always slipped beyond him. he thought. The damned System was mocking him.

"Alright. You’re not in the right mindset for this, but the rage is in me now." Shiv walked forward, slipping out from the foliage. "I think they still have some of your people inside that silo. Go get them while I butcher everyone else. I'm going to take to the air. I'm going to use my Stealth Skill, and I'm going to blanket most of this place in darkness. And then the killing is going to start. Use that as cover.”

Angelo stared at him.

"If you're up for fighting, I recommend you attack and tear through the Blood Horrors holding the streets. There aren't so many other high vampires, and I don't know how good you are. But if you're confident in yourself, go after them.”

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“But… the Court Leviathan…” Angelo’s lip curled. “I cannot ask you to do this. I… You…”

“I want this,” Shiv replied. He turned and regarded the rogue vampire for a moment. “I want to kill them now. You didn’t need to ask. You were just the incentive. The System doesn’t care. But it knows I do. You were just the push.”

Angelo looked confused, but something in his resolve was breaking. “This… this is my failing. My foolishness. You need not risk your life—”

Shiv snorted. "Don't worry about me. But hey, these vampires might surprise me and manage to kill me just yet. So here's hoping."

Angelo stared at him like he was a madman.

Shiv laughed as he spiked his gravity field high into the sky, launching himself across the distance in an explosive instant.

He roared into the air like an artillery shell, but his body trailed shadows all the way. In moments, his Creeping Void splashed down across the world, crawling over the land in cascading, billowing folds of blackness. If the vampires saw Shiv, they only got a glance, for afterward came his shadows, came another spike of speed, came the halting of time.

The colossal whale-like beast let out a pitched shriek, but it froze halfway as Shiv manifested his temporal shell. He immediately spiked himself a dozen times, his Inertial Overdrive roaring to life, thundering in a membrane of force, cupping his body, pulsing and squeezing in tight. He exploded forward, even with time paused, and as he drew closer, he felt his Biomancy slip over the Court Leviathan for the first time. The creature's flesh was a work of art. Shiv felt his breath catch for a moment. It wasn't just meat; it was complex, like a lattice. The way it was made was simply sublime. More than that, he felt additional modifications made to it on a level deeper than blood itself. The .

He remembered Ekkihurst saying something about that.

But then pulsed a wave of gold from within the creature—a tide of defensive Chronomancy. Shiv was surprised; he didn't expect this. But then, as the Chronomantic wave came rushing at him, as he tried to dodge it, he realized what it was. It was like a second layer of the baseline present being enforced around the Court Leviathan. Something that tried to stabilize time and stop Chronomancers from performing their magics nearby: a . Adam's rapier had something of that design as well, before the Recollector broke it.

And that spurred Shiv to go further and faster. Because he knew the wards could be broken.

He impacted the wards hard, and the field emitted around the Court Leviathan shuddered and cracked slightly, but what broke more was Shiv's temporal armor. The entire piece fractured away, and he only had two seconds remaining. Those two seconds, along with his Inertial Overdrive, were more than enough to get him close.

He slammed against the beast's body, and he reached down using his Biomancy. To his pleasure, he realized it didn't have any magical resistance. And why would it? It was a colossal creature, and to approach vampires in most cases in a battle of Biomancy was to court death. Unfortunately for them, Shiv had been seeing death on the regular, and they were practically friends with benefits by this point.

He cast multiple lacerations on the creature's body, and as it split apart, he burrowed his way in with a sudden thrust of his gravitic field. Immediately, he found himself slicing through a secondary membrane lining the interior of the creature's body. This one was composed of mono-fibers, thin and reactive, impossibly strong as well.

He could feel the tensile strength between each and every sinew, but with another laceration spell, they parted as well. He kept going deeper, traveling through a brief maze of bones, until finally he ripped a final layer of inner skin and found himself looking down at not a wet intestine, but an opulent walkway. The walls here were ridged with muscular tissue, but the ground had a plush red carpet, and above, gleaming lights of bioluminescent red drifted from crystallized, organic constructs which he couldn't fully comprehend.

Strider of the Unbending Path 122 > 123

His temporal shell shattered. Time resumed. The Court Leviathan’s shriek finished as Shiv promptly burst his inertial sheath. The explosion went off inside the creature, and it staggered violently, and yet to Shiv's astonishment, it didn't burst apart in a massive waterfall of viscera and blood. Instead, it was badly flayed from within, entire sections of its flesh bursting and rupturing. Sections of the walkway that weren't organic tissue ended up embedded through the walls of muscle, but its bones held, as did most of its interior structure.

He found himself forcefully digging his way out from ruin rather than casually burrowing through more of the creature's body, and nigh instantly, the entry wound he made closed. This thing healed faster than any vampire he'd ever seen. Like it had its own internal Woundeaters.

A smile pulled at Shiv's features.

He hadn’t expected much from them, even with the colossal size of the Court Leviathan. He'd just gotten done fighting an eldritch entity, one that existed across time, one that hit so hard even he could barely endure it. But this was something interesting. If nothing else, it would be an education in Biomancy.

Then he sensed something else, a pulsing wave of power building just a few dozen meters below. Psychomancy mana began to concentrate somewhere, and Shiv immediately adapted.

His Magebreaker was still in pieces. It sometimes vibrated, but it didn't come back together. Just another thing he needed to repair or replace.

Shiv thought. Then he reached into his cloak and pulled out something he hadn't used in a while. His helmet popped off just as the wave of psychokinetic force washed over him. He slammed the Mask of False Paths over his face. It rattled, it rang, but it did not crack, not even close.

Shiv realized. He chuckled to himself.

He spiked down, casting multiple laceration spells. The Court Leviathan healed quickly, but as Shiv forced his body into the wound, as it closed around him, he continued to rip and tear. With every few spikes, he detonated his inertial sheath. He wasn't going fast enough to hurt himself, not really, and he still needed a few seconds before his Chronomancy returned to fullness. But in the meantime, he made do within the Court Leviathan by constantly pumping out more and more of his impenetrable miasma. However, as Shiv dug into the flesh of the beast, the beast's flesh learned of him, and it responded in kind. As he was a Biomancer, so too was the Court Leviathan, and its flesh came aglow with crimson mana.

Shiv let out a disbelieving laugh. He felt the power trembling through it, and it must have been Heroic, more powerful than even Kraid, at the very least. Then more crimson mana flared all around the insides of the creature. He was staring into a welter of blood as he tore, and he pushed through; he was trying to hunt down the Psychomancer first and find the innermost vulnerabilities of the Court Leviathan. But then, there came a burst of spreading within the massive beast. The rush of small particulates was sudden and invasive.

Shiv felt the small motes slip between the gaps in his armor and crawl beneath his skin. Then, he started feeling a tingle within his flesh. A second later, he got confirmation as to what was about to happen.

Disease Resistance 8 > 9

Shiv thought. . And as soon as the thought finished, a swath of painful blisters spread down his back. A spike of immense pain speared through his groin and made his prostate feel like it was on fire. His eyes burned, and pus began to leak out from them. Shiv tried to use his own Biomancy to ward off the diseases, to ward off whatever this creature was doing to him. And then, he realized it hadn't even cast a direct spell yet.

These were casually released infections and viruses.

Shiv had Master-Tier Toughness. He was an immensely powerful Pathbearer by this point. A Heroic one. But in that moment, he was reminded of a lesson in hubris. A lesson that was taught again and again. There was more than one way to die, and more than one way to die easily. Without the proper inoculation, and as a barely trained Biomancer, all he could do was suffer on and fight forward as long as he could while the disease ate away at him.

Shiv felt his heart spasm. A growth began to choke the pumping organ, began to grow throughout him, filling his bowels. His lungs were also being consumed by fast, active threads that withered from the inside, and he soon found himself unable to breathe. But he was a Hero, and with a final inertial detonation, he burst through a layer of bone.

He crashed down within a place that had a massive and complex crystalline platform. There were people with slit throats chained to both sides of the walls, and their blood flowed in complex channels, forming strange patterns on the ground. There, he saw a group of seven vampires, each of them casting their Psychomancy mana to one of their own members, who conducted the complete mana of their mind magic in tandem, using it to hunt down Shiv, to strike at him over and over.

As he landed, they all let out surprised cries of alarm. Shiv chuckled, his voice distorted by the creeping void. He took a few steps towards them, letting out a wheeze. He wanted to taunt them; he wanted to say something to them. But his skin, along with his flesh began to peel and decompose off of his very bones as strange parasites undid him, unstitching him sinew by sinew. Fınd the newest release on NoveI-Fire.ɴet

And as Shiv fell over, he let out a laugh. This death stressed the importance of getting information and knowing your enemy’s capacities. But also, it was an educational death, and a worthwhile one, for a rush of information entered his mind related to viruses and other matters.

Practical Metabiology 33 > 35

Disease Resistance 9 > 14

Woundeater 83 > 85

His Practical Metabiology climbed a little bit after dying for once, as did his Disease Resistance.

And once more, the System played its games.

One of the psionic vampires cried out, speaking to their lead Psychomancer, "Elder Sahari, I can't feel... wait, there's someone..." Shiv flung a bone drill through his chest. Then, just as the main Psychomancer of the group detected him, Shiv froze time again and tore their Lineage Core out from within.