(I) Peace

-Master-Instructor Hercule Attano, Phoenix Academy GEN-PREP 101106 (I)

Peace

After dealing with their “Idiot Weaveress Commander” problem, Courtney, the Court Leviathan, remained where it was; Angelo was allowed to remain aboard Courtney and stare catatonically into his soup, and Uva was allowed to remain in place at her current post, provided that a few other Umbrals kept an eye on her in case she exhibited any .

All in all, this was the most optimal outcome. Null Mont was annoying, troublesome, and frankly kind of an asshole, but Shiv had dealt with assholes before. She wasn't any more special than a customer demanding special treatment or some noble who thought himself better than everyone else.

, Shiv thought to himself.

He snapped his fingers. Finesse was the word he was looking for. Finesse gave him more options and kept things from getting messier. He’d killed enough people to populate a small town recently. A bit of a pause was due. If he kept going like he did before, Shiv worried that he might slip closer to the state he was in when he was affected by the Orcish Skill—not a place he wanted to be.

As a moment of calm followed, he observed two dozen Umbral Geomancers supported by Can Hu lifting sections of the fallen gate back into place. Massive stone supports sprouted out from the ground, forming rows of pillars that led from the Surface Gateway to the Abyssal Gateway. Between them, the gateway to Vulketh was sealed twice over, once by spell and once again by a layer of dense alloy.

For now, the Vultegs and Lord Scorn hadn't even done anything, but Shiv was sure the peace wouldn't last. Lord Scorn was quite offended that his gate had been taken and that his Lesser Marshal and forces had been butchered. Shiv expected another fight on that front sooner or later.

Preferably later right now, though. Right now, Shiv and the others could really use a moment to recover. They had to build up their arms and prepare for the ugliness to come. And there was going to be a great deal of ugliness coming down the way. Especially with Lord Scorn’s Quest hanging over their heads.

, he thought to himself. But if he wanted to break them, he needed to prepare, just like everyone else.

Adam used the opportunity to get some much-needed respite. Right now, he was watching the city from on high. His vector wings sprouted wide, each of the pyramid-like shards glistening in the air. He hovered beside his mana core, and Valor was there with him, gesturing, talking. Shiv found it amusing how Valor and Adam's relationship had developed.

At first, Valor demanded that Shiv stick him in the Young Lord's eye during the incident at Cradle. Now? Now they were talking about all sorts of things. , Shiv thought. Then again, he'd had a busy few weeks too.

Every now and again, Shiv would see one of Uva's mana strands flick across the city, probably scouting down leads or trying to make sure no one was plotting any devious schemes. Her priority assignment right now remained the Owl, figuring out what Aviary was planning, why they were in league with the Educator, and, more importantly, discovering what the Educator exactly was. She also asked for her eldritch book earlier. Shiv was slightly reluctant to give it to her, but then again, he did have the Odes as well, and she needed to understand her new skill. To understand her increasingly Eldritch…

His mind trailed off.

He wasn't sure what the Dreamtaker exactly was. The Outsider had come in and assisted Uva when things got desperate. It reached out to her through the Eldritch Insight skill, and attached part of itself to her—or infused its eldritch domain to her eyes somehow—after she connected her mind to the eldritch tome.

That changed Uva’s Eldritch Insight Skill into something else altogether. The tome they'd taken from Confriga’s vault was aptly named . At times, the book murmured, but it spoke with a myriad of dissonant voices calling out still to the dead Gate Lord, not responding when either Shiv or Uva spoke to it in return.

And there was another mystery they had to deal with. The second book-based mystery, they had, actually. There was still the Educator's Tome of the Forgotten Artist they had to work through. Shiv had taken a glance at that a few moments ago. It was badly burned throughout, but some pictures were still somewhat intact, mostly depicting people or locations from the past. Most of the pictures were utterly ruined, but Valor had said he might be able to restore some of them and uncover some more details regarding the forgotten Ascendant.

As for Shiv himself, he retreated to his personal quarters aboard the Court Leviathan. He suspected these quarters once belonged to the captain of this Leviathan, the one who probably died when Shiv's Inertial Overdrive went off time and time again. But with the interior of the beast so badly demolished, and Shiv uninterested in the vampiric aesthetic of blood and torture anyway, some redecorating was in order.

But that was for later.

His first focus for now was meal preparation. While everyone else worked on their personal tasks for the gate, Shiv pursued his own art form—his own primary non-combat contribution to his team and the gate. He was thankful that the System allowed him this moment of calmness to further focus on his cooking. At some point, either he or a group of Umbrals and Weaveresses would need to move out to survey the surroundings again.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Frankly, he preferred it to be himself. He suspected that the First Blood would likely launch counterattacks or at least scouting teams, and the difference between Compact and Weave’s defensive powers was substantial. Weave, increasingly, seemed the weakest of the Five Faiths to Shiv. They were careful, they moved in the dark, and they operated using small teams to survey their enemies and strike strategically, doing everything they could to avoid battles of attrition.

Shiv had also noticed a distinct lack of high-powered martial Pathbearers among the Weaveresses and Umbrals. Still Water was one of the major Heroes, and her specialty was in Stealth. Her Reflexes were Master-Tier, as was her Physicality, but aside from that, Shiv wasn't sure about her other skills. There was also Dven back at Cradle. However, it, like many of the Heroes or higher at Weave, was more along the lines of utility Pathbearers, people who offered logistical or structural advancements for their society.

Shiv considered that. He considered how accessible the Composer was, how easy it was for her to interact with her people. Her song was always playing, and she had her own place at the heart of her dimension. Compared to that, the Challenger seemed of a higher nature altogether, a fundamental force of existence, a natural disaster of cosmic scale lurking behind a veil. The System supposedly kept gods at bay, but the Composer seemed to have fewer restrictions than all the other ones. , he considered. He recalled her saying something like that.

These were some of the passing thoughts he experienced as he worked on making more food. An Umbral Cryomancer and several Weaveress engineers dropped by to help him set up a few storage silos, large cylindrical structures made from alloy and infused with Cryomancy that were built beneath the Court Leviathan. Furthermore, not far away, Shiv had a “cooking arena” set up for himself.

He didn't exactly have a full kitchen set available to him, but after using his Biomancy to clean the meat a bit and using his Skysplitter’s Master Magical Amplification to heat his massive pan via Pyromancy—or to fill cauldrons with boosted Hydromancy, he started preparing meat by the tons.

The Chef Unwavering 55 > 57

They still needed a self-sufficient water treatment plant along with a waste plant and functional sewage. So far, the survivors of the gate were out of the most critical circumstances, and a great many of them were weak. Many were young, and some had problems with their bodies from long before. Shiv's regeneration had given them a brief surge of vitality. Their organs were rejuvenated, their lesser diseases were obliterated outright, but more complicated difficulties still remained, some far beyond Shiv’s current capabilities to help.

And that made Shiv wonder.

Then, he paused as he considered his Plaguefueled skill.

The prospects of that made him feel a little giddy, but Shiv centered himself before he got a little too deep into the fantasy. He needed to learn more about diseases, about viruses, about nerve agents, and all the things that could compromise a physical body's structure.

Within the Court Leviathan, he died many times. He'd had absolutely no answer to the complexity of the viruses flooding into him. Any other Pathbearer—well, any other organic Pathbearer—would have fallen then, slain by the Biomantic plagues and sicknesses of the First Blood. He was a different case. He could learn in a way no one else could. He could experiment in a way no one else could. And with this Court Leviathan, he had more than just a steady supply of meat. He had something of a biological playground: a perfect test subject.

And then Shiv recalled the prisoner containment pods on the underside of its body, and how it could assimilate biomass. It consumed a few of his bodies as well, directly through its brain. That would be a useful capability for Shiv to learn, wielding biomass directly and potently like that. But also, that might be the cost of sustaining the Court Leviathan. It might be able to regenerate, but its metabolism still ran off a substantial amount of calories, even magically reduced to a minimum.

"Maybe I'm gonna need to go out and hunt down some cave biters for you anyway, huh, girl?" He didn't really know if the Court Leviathan was a girl, but he was already calling it Courtney. So. It was a girl to him. A large, monstrous, plague-infused girl.

At present, Uva said it was mostly in a docile state because it was passive, bred to be so, biomantically and psychomantically altered to be this way. If they wanted to spur it to violence, they needed to control both its body and its mind. She said she doubted she could do it alone since a lot of its biological structures were complicated, requiring more than a few Biomancers to integrate and direct its bodily functions.

Right now, Shiv was barely tapping into any of its proper capabilities. The regeneration it was capable of was simply a passive thing. The beast was capable of shapeshifting, of modifying its biological architecture within and without. It could grow those large maggots that fired out and detonated themselves in spreads of parasitic acid. Shiv had destroyed all those creatures, but the Court Leviathan was definitely capable of growing more of them as well as more varied bio-organisms. It had those wounds within it as well, places for the vampires to conduct whatever foul blood or flesh rituals they did to shape Blood Horrors and other monsters.

, Shiv thought. He remembered how some of the vampires could shapeshift and adjust the nature of their flesh on the fly. Shiv was doing a very rudimentary version of that with his bone armor, but he needed to think further, and if he wanted to get to that point, he needed to advance his Practical Metabiology.

As he finished preparing the bulk of the meat, he made a few easy-to-eat military rations for his allies as well. He stored some of the Court Leviathan flesh in small packages, ones that could fit in a pouch or slot on someone's armor. With the amount of regeneration the Court Leviathan provided, it would be useful for Adam, Uva, or any of the Umbrals and Weaveresses to bring this on a battlefield.

Shiv couldn't always be there with his Woundeaters, and allied Biomancers might be missing as well. If he could cook, if he could continue providing such powerful boosts in combat thanks to The Chef Unwavering, then he was going to do so. Frankly, that was another avenue of advancement for everyone: varied ingredient boosts.

He wanted to see just how many boosts he could offer someone through a combination of different dishes. Right now, it seemed like it furthered someone's existing skills or amplified their physical and mental condition in some way. He hadn't cooked anything that affected magic, though. That was what he wanted to figure out next. Could he make magic better? Could he make someone learn faster if he just cooked the right meal or used the right ingredients?

He had an easy way of making functional health potions for everyone in the form of well-cooked Court Leviathan meat. Mixing in Mendules and some of the river weeds—what were they called again? Whatever it was called, it dramatically boosted that effect as well.

But there were many creatures across the Abyss, many creatures Shiv had yet to sample. Shiv considered a hawk, a rat. More than a recipe book, he was likely going to need to open something of an experimental slaughterhouse for himself. And a farm.

After a few hours, Shiv finished his preparations and stored a good supply of meat for the coming days in a few of his silos. This would go a long way to maintaining the gate’s stability and keep the weakest people fed and hale. He would need to go out and harvest more things in time, but for once, he felt like he had time.

Right now, the System was suspiciously merciful. There were no problems coming from the mercenaries, no fires started, no bombs triggered, no eldritch beings invaded.

Shiv decided he would have time for a moment for himself as he landed upon Courtney, taking a seat on the beast's massive, sloped head.

He watched as half of a district was being connected to the surface district, offering the survivors more room to expand. Soon, they wouldn’t need to be so cramped anymore. The surface district also no longer had any buildings either. Most of their foundations had been compromised, and with how unstable they were, they had to be knocked down anyway, reused as material.

District Gained: