(I) Arachnae

-13 (I)

Arachnae

Shiv made a mad rush for the nearest living thing he could sense the moment the cold started getting too much. It was a good thing his top sprinting speed while he was alive carried over to his Revenant form, because if he had to just drift slowly, he wouldn’t have made it. For kilometers, the world was just burned. Vast expanses of greenery had vanished into ash. Even the rock wasn’t spared, with much of it turning into slag and pooling upon the vitrified ground.

The only part that was safe was a hole in the ground that allowed the flames to pass over. Deep inside, Shiv sensed a lot of glowing vitality signatures. His Biomancy field washed over the creatures below next, and he found himself dealing with what felt like a nest of strange, human-sized snakes.

he offered as silent apology. These creatures probably wouldn’t have died if the dragon didn’t incinerate the land, but such were the dominoes of life. The dragon burned the world and Shiv in the process, and now Shiv was going to sap the life out of some snakes. His touch made one of the snakes hiss in sudden agony, and soon they were all in an uproar, trying to figure out what was wrong.

Vitality Drain > 5

He resurrected at the same time his Vitality Drain Skill advanced, and he found himself standing over the weak snake. The other snakes noticed him in an instant—and attacked without hesitation. Shiv splattered most of them with a pulse of his Biomancy—but the largest snake of the group shrugged off his spell as he struck its Magical Resistance.

Shiv snarled internally. The huge serpent slammed into him, and he caught its upper two fangs before it could clamp down over him. However, his resistance was short-lived. The snake surged forth and Shiv immediately found himself overpowered. He was ripped off his feet and slammed into wall after wall. To Shiv’s surprise, it barely even hurt, and the noise his body made when crashing against the wall was closer to a solid plate of metal than human flesh.As the last snake drove him against the wall, he briefly touched his own skin—and found that it was unnaturally smooth and hard.

The snake clamped its jaws down on his head. Its fangs pressed, cracked, and then fully broke before it could pass through his forehead. It didn’t even break skin. The snake spat acid into Shiv’s eyes, and he expected to be blinded at the least—but the corrosive fluid slid off his face as if he was a pane of glass. The Deathless barked a laugh, and it echoed down the snake’s throat. He then drove his still white-hot kitchen knife into its neck and pulled the blade down. As the snake's guts spilled out, Shiv smashed it aside with a backhanded blow. It crashed into the far wall and didn’t get back up.

It was at this point that Shiv noticed another thing: He was holding his kitchen knife by the lower edge, and he only felt a slight amount of heat. Even with his immense Toughness before, he should have been burned. Shiv turned his Biomancy in on himself and examined his body. Something had changed. Frankly, almost everything was different. There was an added layer of coating all his organs—even in the small bits of his blood. It was smooth and hard, so the title of Diamond Shell was accurate, but it also didn’t seem to impede his other biological functions at all.

“Well. I don’t know if that completely makes up for getting blown up and having my spear and inventory absolutely destroyed too, but…” Shiv let out a breath and looked up. Ash was raining down through the cave entrance, building on the dead snakes. “What in the Broken Moon even was that? It was like… It was like the biggest fireball in the world.” And he was the unluckiest bastard in the world. He just happened to be here when a suicidal dragon came to air his grievances—with the Composer, no less. They channeled enough fire mana to burn a hole through a mountain. Their Pyromancy Skill must be insane. “Okay. I need to get back up. I need to get back to Valor. And then… I’ll figure that out then.”

Foreshadowing: The hero within the dagger calls out to you. He fears you are dead. He fears that he has been abandoned, lost to the world again. He has spent years lost before, and he doesn’t know if he can take much more time alone in the dark. As he might be your only hope in understanding this place, you are his salvation as well. Take heart to know that your actions dictate more than your own fate.

The words echoed in Shiv’s mind with a voice of thunder. He blinked as his Foreshadowing Skill activated the first time, filling him with details he didn’t know about, and a feeling—that he to get back to Valor.

With a leap, he shot out from the cave entrance—and felt like he was in a burning building. Shiv coughed from all the smoke and heat in the air, and he found himself glad his Toughness just evolved. It was so uncomfortable for him to be here right now, how bad might it have been with normal Toughness? His skin might have puddled right off his bones. For now, he was merely uncomfortable. And also strangely glossy. There was a new texture to his skin, and Shiv kind of liked it.

he thought.

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It took him a bit of looking to find Valor, but the dagger’s constant shouting helped in finding the right spot to dig into the ash.

“Valor!” Shiv said, coughing and wheezing from the searing air. “You alright?” The stone dagger was weirdly cold. Like it couldn’t be affected by heat at all. Shiv already had an excuse planned for how he survived this: He would tell a partial truth. “A wave of fire came at us. I managed to survive by diving into a giant snake nest in the ground.”

Valor sounded incredulous, and Shiv didn’t blame the dagger.

“A dragon. I think. He called himself Sir Legend Marikos Valdemar of the Descenders Union. He unleashed all that fire on a distant mountain and—well, he burned a hole through it. There’s a gateway there, I think. It’s made out of webs and he’s yelling at the Composer to come out and kill him.” The words tumbled out of Shiv’s mouth as he described what happened as best he could. “I think that’s all the details.”

“That’s his title?”

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“Yeah, he’s crying pretty loud.” And Shiv wasn’t lying. He held up Valor so he could hear the deafening sobs coming from Marikos, even from afar.

Valor muttered.

Shiv’s jaw dropped. Of all the things he expected the dagger to ask him, this wasn’t it.

Foreshadowing: The Dragon Knight stares at the blood on his hands. He didn’t mean to do it—they weren’t supposed to be there. This wasn’t supposed to be the nature of his victory. Before him, his great rival holds his dying hatchling and weeps, wailing for a Biomancer, wailing for someone to help him. But no one comes. They are all content to watch, and everyone cheers for Sir Legend Marikos Valdemar of the Descenders Union! Praise be the Fortress that Soars! Praise be the last bulwark of the Lowest Path!

But he knows the truth. He has just killed a child. He has killed a child to sate his wounded pride.

He has become a monster—the kind that his father was. He is no Knight.

This time, a dreamlike scene played out before Shiv’s eyes, and he took a moment to shake it off. It was like he was there, watching the dragon sobbing in the distance, staring at the blood on their armored claws, while not far away was a smaller, blue-scaled dragon holding their child, true as Foreshadowing described.

This skill… was very strange. It felt like it should belong to a Diviner. But Shiv was definitely not that. He knew that one’s Path determined what skills they gained to a major extent, but he couldn’t understand why he would get this.

Mustering his courage and marching against his own better judgment, Shiv made his way across the blasted landscape toward the sorrowful Dragon Knight.

“Hey, Valor,” Shiv asked along the way, mainly to take his mind off things. “Do you know of a skill called Foreshadowing?”

“Yeah. I got it when I… dove into the cave filled with snakes.”

Valor paused.

Shiv pressed his lips together. Never mind, this skill was practically made for him. “Well, it’s showing me things. Things about Marikos. He, uh, apparently murdered the child of a rival during some kind of duel. They were a dragon as well. That’s probably the thing he’s broken up about.”

A low huff of frustration came from Valor.

“You sound like you know him.”

“Pyre of the what?”

Shiv looked down and saw his reflection. His chef’s outfit was burned rags, and his skin beneath shone with a polished gleam. “Yeah. I believe him. I’m walking through a giant glass crater right now.”

“I… will keep that in mind.” Shiv was interested to learn about more of these norms, but maybe not from a depressed dragon that could obliterate entire sections of the world.

As Shiv came within a few hundred meters of the dragon, Ser-Legend Marikos Valdemar noticed him, looked away, and then did a double take. He shifted in the air and flew closer toward Shiv, and the Deathless did his best to hide how stunned he was.

Marikos was large. Not as long as Vicar Sullain’s winding form, but he truly was the size of a fortress, and the greataxe he carried might have run for a good hundred meters. The Dragon-Knight’s wingbeats nearly launched Shiv off his feet. But it was the spell patterns of fire dancing around the dragon’s body that gave him pause. Marikos’s armor was something carved from a mountain. Huge, black plates coated every part of his body aside from his lizard-like face, and as Marikos landed, the world announced his descent with a small earthquake.

Shiv tried to peek at Marikos with his Biomancy, but he found himself pressing against an iron wall. Of course the Dragon-Knight had Magical Resistance too—there was just no weakness Shiv could see.

Marikos sniffed the air, and some of Shiv’s smoldering rags snapped free, as if they were being vacuumed away.

Every word the Dragon-Knight spoke made Shiv’s ears ring, but his new Diamond Shell seemed to help blunt some of the effects there as well.

Shiv greeted the Dragon-Knight as casually as he could. Worst came to worst, he’d get killed and have to drain from Marikos. He wondered how many times Marikos could survive being drained. Probably a lot, judging from how resilient the raven-helmed stranger was.

“I’m Shiv,” he began. “And you’re the Fortress That Soars: The great Sir-Legend Marikos Valdemar of the Descenders Union.” Great. He nailed that. He remembered everything.

He saw the dragon’s bright orange eyes widen.

Foreshadowing: The woman struggles as the agents pin her down. They gag her and declare her a mad woman to all those who are watching. The lead agent looks on quietly, silently ashamed, but determined to see this done. The Prismatic Order upholds the stability of the Yellowstone Republic. Whatever it takes.