(II) Plaguefueled

99 (II)Plaguefueled

Once more, Shiv respawned. Just in time to receive a flood of infectious bacteria, viruses, strange gases, and things pulsing through the interior of the Court Leviathan’s brain. Shiv paused time briefly as he tried examining the various biological weapons that were going to kill him in a moment. He regarded them briefly and winced. His Practical Metabiology was nowhere near up to snuff for this. He felt like he was that feral alley kid again, barely able to pronounce some dishes on a set list, while Georges muttered stuff about spitting on the matrons at the orphanage when he saw them for giving him an idiot.

Shiv let time resume just as another temporal wave rushed toward him. It cut through him without issue, and the collective swarm of biological micro-weapons turned Shiv’s body into a deformed lump of oozing meat that sprayed pus and foul flesh-soup everywhere as he shuddered.

Disease Resistance 40 > 50 (Skill Evolution Imminent)

Shiv did a double-take at the notification. That was an absolutely enormous jump for his Disease Resistance. It might be the largest concentration of levels he'd gained beside the System directly raising his Stealth to 50 and Chronomancy to 100 as rewards. Then Shiv lost all coherent thought as something assimilated his brain for its own use.

After a few moments spent in a chaotic haze, Shiv died again. As he respawned this time, he noticed that his body was untouched. The Court Leviathan didn’t consume him this time—just like that Malteek guy commanded. They also made a few mistakes about which of Shiv’s skills were Heroic-Tier, but that was understandable: It made more sense than assuming he could come back from the dead.

Practical Metabiology 35 > 36

Skill Evolution: Disease Resistance (Initiate) > Plaguefueled (Master)

Plaguefueled 50 > 58

The answer to how his Skill Evolution functioned was revealed in the next second as all the viruses, bacteria, and other bioweapons hovering in the air came alight with a pristine, white glow. The same glow that Shiv perceived to layer kitchens and cooking ingredients while The Chef Unwavering was active.

Now, Shiv was getting a bit giddy. This was going to be .

As Shiv drained from the Court Leviathan once more, he felt the beast shuddering violently. It was growing weaker—its flame was growing dimmer. That’s when it fully struck him how much vitality it took to bring him back to life now. The shrimp in the rivers weren’t going to cut it anymore.

Shiv’s resurrective cocoon burst apart and released his new body. An ocean of sicknesses drowned Shiv immediately. He let out a groan of misery and torment as most of his flesh began to burst and seep foul-smelling fluid. A fever swelled inside him at the same time, and he felt the urge to rip his dick off from how nightmarishly bad it was itching. His nervous system collapsed again, and his organs nearly followed. But before Shiv gave into the urge to castrate himself and curse the System for giving him the worst Master-Tier Skill of all time, something happened.

He started feeling

One after another, the symptoms consuming him began to fade as his body off of them. Shiv felt himself grow stronger, felt his senses grow sharper, felt his body get harder than ever before as he assimilated nerve agents, mutated viruses, and flesh-eating bacteria. More than that, he felt a strange, instinctive awareness regarding the shapes of these sicknesses. He wouldn’t be able to replicate them off the top of his head, but he could sort of sort their biological architectures from each other now.

Seconds passed. The first wave of afflictions washed through Shiv and ended up feeding him again. He felt better than he had in ages. Adrenaline exploded through his body. Power swelled within his muscles—hell, his muscles were growing thicker from this, anyway. The damn plagues were hitting him like a deluge of steroids.

Shiv laughed at the absurdity of it all. Then he coughed and gagged violently as new infections attacked his lungs. For a few seconds, he hacked mouthfuls of blood, then his Plaguefueled Skill assimilated that too, and he felt better than ever.

Plaguefueled 58 > 59

“Feed me more viruses!” Shiv cheered, his pupils dilating, his heart pumping. Gods, the plagues hit the spot. Shiv was alive, and the world was beautiful. There were still a few diseases attacking his body effectively. One actively shifted between decaying his heart and breaking his metabolism. It was being absorbed too, but slowly. Much more slowly. Shiv realized then that it was because it was mutating and changing faster than all the others. Still some limits to the skill.

He wasn’t immune. It was probably still possible to kill him with enough viruses. But if they failed to kill him, they would end up fueling him with a rush of power instead.

“I love plagues!” Shiv cheered, intoxicated with the constant explosions of energy coursing through his body. He felt drunk and drugged out of his mind at the same time. Was being drunk considered drugged? He wasn't sure right now. His thoughts grew even more hectic. A weird thing to get from all the sicknesses afflicting him, but did it feel good. He managed to get his hands on a new bone knife, and he . He slashed so hard that a massive chasm tore open beneath him. Brain matter parted first. Then split hardened muscular tissue and eight meters of bone. A gap opened below, revealing a large of some kind.

Shiv froze time before the leviathan could heal and spiked his gravitic field over fifty times in quick succession. His flesh was boiling. His bones were breaking one after another, but that didn’t matter. He loved this. He was drunk on plagues and brimming with power.

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His bones shattered, his skin seared and ripped apart. The left side of his body was screaming in pain, but Shiv couldn’t help but chuckle. It all felt too good. The brain matter of the Court Leviathan outright into ashes. It didn’t even burn. Most of the flesh surrounding Shiv simply ceased to be. Then came a tide of force, and the chasm-sized wound lining the Court Leviathan expanded into a whole field. Shiv smashed into the chamber just below, bringing fire and ruin in his wake.

He barely noticed the few hundred high vampires partially fused in bone-pods lining the surrounding walls. He barely realized how large the chamber was, and how many vampires and Blood Horrors were in here. His senses were a mess. His thoughts skipped, and during fleeting moments of coherence, he realized he was , and getting drunker with every new disease his body consumed.

As he crashed to the ground, an avalanche of fire and destruction crashed down thereafter. The stone floor at Shiv’s feet exploded into a hurricane of piercing shrapnel. The Court Leviathan shook. Shiv burst his inertial sheath. The entire 500-meter-wide throne room was reduced to nothing but dust and rubble. Hundreds of vampires inside died without even knowing what killed them as flames reduced them to ashes. The stronger ones merely burned but were splattered against the walls.

It was not enough for Shiv.

He felt his own body crack and split in painful ways, but rather than flinging a Woundeater at the nearest vampire he saw, he reverted time back a second. His temporal shell cracked slightly—then nearly broke off his body when a pulsing wave from the temporal wardings hit him. It didn’t matter. Shiv found himself back mid-acceleration again. Another tide of flame and force followed behind him as he fed his Inertial Overdrive another dozen gravitic pulls. His spine broke vertically along the middle. His flesh melted off his bones. Shiv just kept laughing as he slammed against the shattered floor of the throne room once more.

Another waterfall of annihilation. Another swelling riptide of fire and destruction. Another bursting of his inertial sheath. A fourth of the titanic Court Leviathan was ripped apart as most of its front and back and sloping head peeled open. The creature’s insides were exposed to the Umbral Wilderness. Through it all, Shiv never stopped pumping out darkness using his Creeping Void, and so a most unnerving blackness oozed free from the roaring leviathan’s open wounds.

But only for a moment. A second later, the Court Leviathan began to regenerate.

“Godsdamned,” Shiv breathed, now more impressed with the flying monster than his new Master-Tier Skill. “The First Blood didn’t felling half-ass growing something like you, did they?”

“We… do not… half-ass.” Shiv blinked and looked down. Then, as he pushed through his drunken stupor, he sensed the presence of a vampire before him. A shimmering barrier of fire and blood circled around the ash-shrouded figure. A half-melted throne made from iron and turned to pooling slag behind him.

Shiv blinked as the high vampire’s form came into shape.

For the first time, Shiv saw the Court Leviathan’s captain. Master Malteek was a tall, thin vampire. His eyes burned in the haze, two pits of flame in sunken sockets. Over his shoulder, a curled set of bones rose out from his spine, constituting what looked like a collapsed set of wings that gleamed with white-hot heat. His Biomancy was oddly only Adept-Tier, but his Pyromancy was immensely powerful. It was immense, but its field was not particularly wide. It, much like Shiv's Strider, was completely compacted around his body, not something he projected outward.

Shiv wondered what kind of Skill Evolution the vampire had.

“Shit.” Shiv chuckled. Now there was a third thing he was impressed by. “One of you managed to survive.”

“A Tenth Elder is not easy prey,” the vampire wheezed. As the dust washed over him, Shiv noted he was unburned, but Malteek’s body was badly broken in several places. For a beat, Shiv studied the vampire, while the latter looked off into the impenetrable darkness, trying to hide how fractured his courage was. “I have tasted your power. I understand I face a Hero. I understand this is not a fight I can easily win. But you have made a mistake. The First Blood will not forgive the murder of a Tenth Elder. But all can be forgiven between great Pathbearers. Mistakes are understandable throughout life, after all. Let us talk about things. Let us talk so that we might make this ruinous affair a fruitful one by the end.”

Shiv paused. The vampire was strangely polite and decent, even after everything Shiv did. Maybe he could have this conversation. It wouldn’t hurt. It—

Rose rasped.

The Deathless blinked and shook his head. As Malteek continued speaking, Shiv slammed his fists together, silencing the vampire. Shiv exploded forward with a pull on his gravitic field. A Woundeater flared. His injuries faded. He drove a mana-charged flying knee into the Master-Tier vampire’s chest. He struck Malteek’s strange armor made from layered teeth and blasted the vampire’s torso. A mana explosion followed as Shiv’s spell met Magical Resistance, but Malteek's body disintegrated before the physical strength of the Deathless. Even so, Shiv didn’t feel the vampire’s Lineage Core pop.

He tried to turn and go for what remained of the vampire’s body, but he felt all the friction get ripped away from him as he slid forward across space unnaturally. A rush of thermal energy shifted from Shiv into the mutilated remains of Malteek. The world became . Shiv pulled on his field several times, but each time he glided awkwardly through the air, until he ended up shooting through the massive wound he left on the Court Leviathan.

A moment later, Shiv found himself twisting through the air, battling to steady his movements. Hitting Malteek seemed to have inflicted Shiv with a lingering version of the Frictionless Vector Skill. As he sailed, turning over and over in the air, Shiv watched as the massive body of the Court Leviathan regenerated. It glared in his general direction with a cluster of eyes and let out a furious wail.

It lashed out blindly into the darkness with its tentacles—some swinging wide and digging deep furrows along the ground below. As Shiv turned again, he caught a glimpse of the town beneath him and saw a group of vampires rising into the air. One of them was a particularly potent Biomancer—their mana field stretching what felt like five kilometers. As Shiv felt a violent surge of flesh-magic clench at his tissue, the Court Leviathan also unleashed a salvo of what looked to be .

Enormous, acid-filled wing-maggots burst out from the Court Leviathan’s flesh. They flew fast and exploded in the air, filling the sky with corrosive, paralytic fluids. Thᴇ link to the origɪn of this information rᴇsts ɪn NoveI-Fire.ɴet

They struck nothing at all. The vampire Biomancer also lost track of Shiv an instant later.

Shiv didn’t bother holding his position to find out if he could beat the incoming vampire reinforcements or resist the paralyzing fluids unleashed by the big ugly bugs. No, he projected himself across time before the leviathan’s temporal wardings pulsed again—back to the temporal anchor he'd imprinted on the leviathan’s brain.

Once more, Shiv found himself meshed in the leviathan’s tissues, and once more, he found himself bathed in new and tasty sicknesses. He suffered for a moment before his body consumed the diseases as active nourishment. After that, he repeated what he did earlier and used his Inertial Overdrive to make an even larger hole in the Court Leviathan.

With a final detonation of his sheath, Shiv obliterated most of the leviathan’s upper body. And it still kept flying. It still kept regenerating. By this point, a good percentage of the rooms and vampires within the Leviathan were just . If Malteek managed to survive the final blast, Shiv couldn’t find him. There was no throne room or ship bridge anymore. It was just a deep gorge of regenerating flesh and Shiv standing in the pit.

He focused his Biomancy and detected a few more vampires and Blood Horrors still inside. He was probably also going to need to deal with the group of vampires flying up from the town, but he wasn’t too worried. Mostly because he still felt drunk, but also because he was now marveling at the Court Leviathan.

Shiv barked a joyous laugh as he realized he might have come across the solution to the food shortage problem—along with a whole host of other problems faced by Gate Theborn. “Alright. You win, Court Leviathan. You get to live. Hells. I’m you. You’re mine now.”